Marie Wilson Nelson's Page

Please indicate your World Café experience (ONLY IF YOU HAVE ACTUAL WORLD CAFE EXPERIENCE) in one or more of the following roles:

Host, Sponsor, Participant

If you are new to the World Cafe, would you please share how you heard about this community?

Found and read a book about it several years ago. N

What field is the primary focus of your World Café work (ONLY CHECK AREAS WHERE YOU ARE ALREADY ACTIVELY USING WORLD CAFE PLEASE)?

Education, Community

What knowledge, skills or resources would you like to contribute to the World Café community to help it grow and flourish?

Am willing to be of help in any way that uses my skills. I've been using emergent-design facilitaton strategies in teaching, research and large conference settings for many years and have been using emergent-design action research and ethnographic approaches to study their effectiveness and hone the processes. It's exciting to see resistance to such approaches lessening and to see how quickly they have been going mainstream.

My current uses and adaptations of the World Cafe model are in graduate teacher education and in the Tampa Bay community.

My goals are to expand awareness among educators and the general public about more natural ways to facilitate learning/growth/change. The world Cafe model is one of these. To this end I use it to build and maintain community in groups by strengthening personal connections, to de-center the role of the professor/teacher/expert, to disperse power more equally, to offer people enough practice with a more democratic way of learning/teaching/information sharing so that they become comfortable using it in their own classrooms and groups, to make discussing controversial issues feel safer, to process difficult reading assignments in depth, to help people open up to challenging new ideas, to help implement universal design for learning, to provide a way for shy people to grow confident expressing their ideas, to help talkative people improve their listening and self-monitoring abilities, and to ensure that all learners/ participants can receive explanations at the moment they begin to feel confused so that the explanations are retained.

What would you most like to receive from this community?

Am checking in again to see how the theory, practice and applications of the World Cafe have evolved since I was last here.