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Our Children and Young People’s team have recently run valuing diversity sessions with the year 4 classes and Louisa James, learning mentor and family worker, invited us to run a community conversation in her Thursday parent group. The aim of this was to help with the bridge building between parents. At this meeting there were 11 culturally diverse mothers from four different religions.Tallat (Muslim Mediation Service) and Ros (Community Conversations) got the parents thinking together about some questions. Everyone joined in and spoke from the heart - something we pretty much guarantee in Community Conversations! They all also joined in the various games led by Louisa, many of which the children also play as part of the valuing diversity sessions: sun shines on, zip/zap/zop and name-and-action.
Firstly parents shared great parenting moments, a deliberately positive question. As always, parents were given a few minutes to respond to the question in pairs before they spoke in turn in the whole group. For some parents, this was their first experience of speaking out in a group like this. It was interesting that two parents shared their success at giving boundaries to their children after having attended the ‘Triple P’ parenting course and two others were proud that they had given their children a little bit of freedom to do something on their own although they were very nervous about it.
Then they thought about the question “What I want to pass on to my children”. This was a question that got parents to share together the values that they hold most dear. Although most parents nodded and agreed with what each other said, a key role of the facilitator is to accept, affirm and summarise what each person says so that they know that what they have said in the group is important and has value, even when they may be saying something different to the others in the group.
Finally they got into small groups with flip chart paper and pens to come up with their ideas for making sure their children learned their values. In all Community Conversations we give the last question a practical, forward focus and as usual there were plenty of great comments that were then shared with everybody.
The meeting ended with the usual go-round “what I valued/enjoyed about the meeting” and the two main things were the company and the activities. Tallat also heard one mother say on her way out in Urdu “we have done something with our brains instead of cooking and cleaning“.
Louisa was delighted with the participation and enthusiasm of the parents and we spent some time helping to draw out what it was that brought the magic. Louisa said: ”I think the open questions were good, and getting them into groups and then they feed off each other. I think listening skills and repeating back what they said really helped and I will do this next time. Also it is a good idea to have flipchart paper and let them write things down… getting them to think and leaving it to them”.
Quote from Ros: “Most of these parents had not spoken before and they showed real pleasure in getting to know each other a little. Working in primary schools is such a great setting for a Community Conversation as everyone is guaranteed to bump into each other again. I am glad that Louisa now has the confidence to use her facilitation and mediator skills to bring some Community Conversation methods into the Thursday parents group!”
