World Café

As part of our 21st Century Children project, which is generously funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, we want to evaluate our sector and explore shared characteristics of children’s museums. The aim is to pass this knowledge on to the community in order to help them to develop sustainable initiatives. This session is designed as a training session for (children’s)museum professionals and policy makers alike.

The World Café is a group interaction method fostering dialogue to gather collective knowledge of large groups. Our World Café is made up of 15-20 lightning talk presentations evolving around the 21st cenutury children focus topics of the conference.. Each speaker acts as host to his/her own round table. All lightning talks are simultaneously given and delegates will then have 30 minutes to discuss the presented idea. This pattern is repeated three times, giving delegates the opportunity to move from table to table and engage in unscripted dialogues with the table presenters. This session type provides a high level of interactivity between presenter and audience and often includes field-tested, living-use cases and examples. After the final round, each host presents the results of the discussions in an informal 3-minute talk.

In the course of this interactive workshop-like session, a wide range of relevant aspects of children-focused museum work will be discussed in order to evaluate how to future-proof the sector.