In November 2011, I spent an enjoyable two days in Turin with the European Training Foundation (ETF) where I ran a Knowledge Café in three languages, English, French, and Russian. It wasn’t as difficult as I first thought.
The Knowledge Café was part of a two-day workshop for around 90 participants from ETF member countries where they discussed the role of evidence in “governance and effective Vocational Education and Training (VET) policies”.
Partner countries included Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia And Herzegovina, Croatia, Egypt, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Georgia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kosovo. So quite an ethnic mix.
The Café was a challenge given a large number of participants and the fact that three languages were being spoken: English, French, and Russian.
This meant that each table needed to be labeled with the language intended to be spoken at that table and when people changed tables they needed to move to a table where their language was spoken.
My introduction to the Knowledge Café and an explanation of the process was simultaneously translated into French and Russian.
Then whereas usually, I would have brought everyone together in a circle at the end of the Café I merely asked for a few people to share with the rest of the group what they had learned from their conversations.
This was done by passing around a couple of stick mikes.
Not the perfect way to run one of my Cafés but a reasonable adaptation in the circumstances.
Note the tables are not perfect and the small groups are a little too large.
You can see in the background three translation booths that allowed people to understand each other in the large group conversation at the end of the Café.
Designing Knowledge Cafés to bring people together in conversation in seemingly difficult situations is often much easier than you might think.
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