This activity can only be completed, after participating in all selected activities in the Listening- Acknowledging- Responding stages of the learning process. The 10 Principles, Identity, Conflict, Dialogical Scout and Perceptions are core topics to be discovered first. The Dialogue Café comes at the end of this learning journey as a variety of objectives should be acquired first.
Note: Dialogue Cafés can be challenging and require careful preparation and facilitation. When preparing for a Dialogue Café, we encourage you to engage with the Accredited Dialogue Facilitators in your region.
Preparation:
- You should start by creating the entire process for each dialogue café. This includes creating a safe space, defining the purpose and ensuring you are equipped with necessary facilitator support or skills.
- For tips on preparing and leading a dialogue, you can look through the D4P Manual pg 81-81, and the Dialogue Facilitator Manual.
Dialogue Café:
- A dialogue café should have a topic, which can be decided by the participants or by the facilitator in advance. To find the topic, you can consider the following approaches:
- In advance, participants propose or agree on one or two topics
- The topics are already agreed
- Free contribution and vote during the intro of the session
- The Dialogue Café is in response to the need for Dialogue, therefor the topic is already defined
- Set the ground rules for dialogue – develop ground rules or the guidelines for the interaction within the group; making sure that these guidelines are clear and followed. Use the ground rules within the manual as a starting point, these are essential for any dialogue (D4P Manual pg 90-91)
- Arrange the chairs in a circle, facing inward (no more than 10 chairs).
- It is advised to have a dialogue café with 5-10 participants, maximum.
- Share the topic and explain the dialogue café process to the participants.
- The ground rules
- 10 principles for dialogue
- how long the dialogue will be
- 5-10 people at one time, other observers are silence
- The facilitator should keep track of time and give others the same amount of time to talk about the subject (2-3 min each), as and when they want to
- It is advised to have 20-30 minutes in total to talk about the chosen subject
- Don’t force someone to speak, invite ‘people to share who have yet to’ and create the safe space for contributions.
- Summarise or reframe the dialogue if it goes off topic
- The facilitator should only ask questions if necessary, their role is to listen actively, help summarize or reframe, or repeat something being said if necessary to get participants back on track of the subject. Further guidance on host a dialogue can be found in the Dialogue Facilitator Manual.
- Once the time is up or the dialogue organically comes to an end, you should start the reflection.
- Repeat all stages if you have two or more groups.
Note: To create and maintain a safe space, the facilitator ensures that all participants do their best to suspend their judgments and take the risk of sharing their feelings and perceptions as well as surface their deeper questions, without losing sight of the aim of dialogue: to collectively reach mutual understanding, not necessarily reaching an agreement, on one or more issues, possibly even finding some common grounds.
Note: If you have more than 10 participants in your activity, we recommend having the dialogue café in the centre of the room. Those not participating in the first round, should observe silently from the outside. Once the time is up, invite the remaining participants to take a seat on the chairs and change the topic for dialogue.
