Café Conversations
Understanding the past requires students to develop an awareness of different perspectives. The Café Conversation teaching strategy helps students practice perspective-taking by requiring students to represent a particular point-of-view in a small group discussion. During a conversation with people representing other backgrounds and experiences, students become more aware of the role many factors play (i.e. social class, occupation, gender, age, etc) in terms of shaping one’s attitudes and perspectives on historical events. Café Conversations can be used as an assessment tool or can prepare students to write an essay about a specific historical event.
Step one: Teacher preparation
Select 5-10 personalities that represent different political attitudes and backgrounds during the time period you are studying. The individuals you select to represent different attitudes can be real people, or composites of real people. For each personality, prepare a short biography which includes information such as gender, age, family status (married, single, how many children, etc.), occupation, education level and significant life events. Next, you will need to select an issue or event relevant to the time period that you want all of these personalities to discuss. For example, students can discuss who they will vote for in an upcoming election or they might discuss how war is affecting their lives.
Step two: Students prepare for Café Conversation
Assign students a particular personality to represent. Give students the relevant background information and/or biography to read. After reading this background information, you might have students create an identity chart for their character. Then ask students to hypothesize how this person would feel about the matter at hand – the event or question they will be discussing during the Café Conversation. Often teachers have students work on this step in small groups with other students who have been assigned the same person to represent at the café. To ensure that students accurately represent their person’s point of view, before the Café Conversation begins you might review a worksheet students are required to complete and/or have a brief check-in with groups.
Step three: Café Conversations
During the Café Conversation, students represent their assigned personality in a discussion about the assigned topic. The conversation should begin with students introducing themselves. Then, one member announces the conversation-started (often a question or statement prepared in advance). It can be as simple as, “So I head that ___ is happening? What do you think about this?” Conversations typically last at least 20 minutes, but can run much longer. Before beginning these conversations, it is important to go over norms about how to disagree respectfully and about staying on-topic. Here are two different ways you can structure Café Conversations:
Jigsaw: Divide the class into groups so that each group has students representing different personalities. In this format, many Café Conversations will be happening simultaneously. If one group ends early, you can let them go around the room and listen to the conversations other groups are having.
Fishbowl: Make a circle of chairs in the center of the room. The number of chairs should represent the number of assigned personalities. Invite one member from each group to join the conversation. The rest of the class watches the conversation. At certain moments, you can announce switch, meaning that a student in the fishbowl is replaced by another group member. Or, you can allow students to “tap” a group member on the shoulder when he/she wants a turn to speak.
Step four: Journal writing
After the Café Conversations have wrapped up, ask students to write a journal entry reflecting on their experience at the café. Possible journal prompts include:
- What do you think it may have felt like for your character to hear these different perspectives? How do you think it might have changed his/her point of view, if at all?
- How did it feel for you to participate in the Café Conversation? During what part of the conversation did you feel most comfortable? Least comfortable? Why do you think that is?
- What did you learn about this moment in history from participating in this activity?
- What did you learn about yourself or about human behavior from participating in this activity?
Step five: Debrief
Give students the opportunity to debrief this activity. You could facilitate a class discussion, starting with a general question such as, “What did you learn from this activity?” Or, you could begin the debrief discussion as a wraparound with each student sharing one idea from their journal entry.
- Add a research component: Instead of preparing short biographies for students, you can assign students a historical figure and have them research this person’s background. It is helpful to provide students with guidelines, such as a list of questions, which outline the information you expect them to find. Students can complete this research independently or in small groups.
- Literature-based Café: Rather than focus on personalities in a particular time period, you can structure a Café Conversation around characters from a novel or from several books you have read. The focus of the conversation could be an event from the book or it could be a question related to human nature.
Many Facing History teachers use the Café Conversation strategy as a way to help students synthesize information from the online module, The Weimar Republic: the Fragility of Democracy, and related readings from chapter 3 of the resource book Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior (HHB).You can structure the Café using the Key Personalities found on the online module and/or the biographies in the reading, “Hard Times Return” (HHB, pp. 148-150). Each group then examines the online module, The Weimar Republic: the Fragility of Democracy, and Holocaust and Human Behavior readings from Chapter 3 to answer the question: How might your character vote in the 1932 election and why? The Café Conversation takes place in an imagined Berlin café, ca. 1932. They discuss the state of affairs in Germany, their varying attitudes toward the Nazis and other parties, and what they think the Weimar years have "taught" them about democracy and political decision-making.
For an example of this strategy in a lesson plan, refer to lesson 7 of the unit Decision-Making in Times of Injustice.
