Oh Birgitt: 

What a wonderful story. 

Let me counter with my own. I recently led an open space at the high school 
in which I volunteer. The group were 60 high school students and about 8 
teachers and three community workers who came together to talk about issues 
of school safety.  (Today, the teachers, the community workers and myself 
had a discussion to debrief the process.) 

The Open Space got off to a wonderful start. The students were really 
interested although some had volunteered, they said, so they could get out 
of French class!! 

The students got right into it. They were very concerned about weapons and 
violence. They raised issues of being able to walk home safely without 
being harrassed by local gangs. They were concerned that there was too much 
swearing and disrepectful talk. And they were full of great ideas and 
reccommendations. The teachers were thrilled and pleased at the idea that 
they did not have to "do it all" when it came to solving the school safety 
issues. They appreciated that the solutions the kids came up with would not 
necessarily have been ones they would have chosen but understood that the 
kids were being true to what they thought would work in their culture. 

The teachers also had an interesting time experimenting with striking the 
balance with not directing the kids and deflecting when some kids wanted to 
use the teacher in the group to debate whether the teachers were doing what 
they should be doing and blaming teachers. The question they raised with me 
in the debrief was, "Do you have some suggestions for how we could be more 
effective in encouraging the kids to come up with solutions rather than 
just defending our actions?" I didn't see as much defensive behaviour as 
the teachers had felt they'd displayed. They were really keen to encourage 
the kids to take ownership of the issues and they were really very good at 
this. 

The conclusions they came to were that Open Space had really worked well 
with the kids. That both kids and teachers could benefit from running more 
meetings in Open Space - that they would get more and more familiar with 
the benefits that could acrue and that they would all get better at using 
it and harvesting the opportunities. 

All in all, I was really pleased. 

Regards, 
Esther