Cafe Roshd | About

Cafe Roshd Story

Café Roshd is an actual café built by participating students of the project. It starts with interested high school students applying to join Café Roshd. After receiving enough applications, the main work starts and students completely build a real café.
Why a café? Undoubtedly café is one of the most popular places people hangout and spend memorable moments in. In café people meet, expand their friendships, eat and drink, chatter, enjoy their social and cultural relations and customs, synergize, and create new norms, styles and customs for a better life. Music, books and magazines, movies, performances, works of art, discussions, sharing knowledge and news are all parts of a café. All of the above together can be a wonderful and complete training context to cover our methods in learning and education: learning by doing, art, fun theory and gamification.
And why Roshd (development)? We deeply believe that in all the events and moments of life there are opportunities for everybody to grow, opportunities that if discovered and correctly applied, can obviously and intuitively be imported in our lives. Many of us unconsciously use these opportunities to improve our lives. But it is necessary to benefit these events around us more by developing and empowering our skills. Considering this viewpoints, we chose the name of Roshd for our café, as we want our trainees to see and apply these developments objectively and intuitively in their individual and social lives.

Goals and Perspective

Café Roshd is founded with the purpose of lasting education & internalizing the skills & learning. We intend our participants to experience skills they need in their lives but is missing, paid less attention to, or normally impossible to experience in simulated & low-risk environment in the educational system of Iran We believe that Café Roshd project has internal effects on the participants. Our approaches and methods applied in Café Roshd affects the participants’ unconscious and are highly influential in internalization of concepts and experiences.
New experiences or risky opportunities in a safe, simulated environment results in growth of perseverance and strength to face the fears, dangers, and monsters within the participants. This ability is obtained not in a short time, but during several months of running the project. Process of believing, internalization, collective identity formation, breaking stereotypes and formation of shared values were something that had been thought about in advance and already happened in Café Roshd. It should be reminded that the context of Café Roshd helps the participants to obtain a better understanding of themselves, their capabilities, friends & surrounding before anything else, & this background will undoubtedly help them to make better & more stable decisions in future.

Courses

Café Roshd has various parts and according to the conditions, some parts may be included or excluded from it. The basic origin of Café Roshd is learning and practicing of soft skills like critical thinking, effective communication, presentation and facilitating skills, innovation & creativity, teamwork & leadership, self-education, and also applied skills such as planting & gardening, vegetarian cooking, making movies and documentaries, graphic and visual design, communication and media, algorithm and programming, music basics, business model generation, fashion design, interior design, using related softwares, creation works of art, etc.

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Successful Run Example

Based on our plan and vision, and with these grounds, we found Café Roshd. To start it, we needed to find a host for our project. Thus we accepted the invitation of one of the girls’ high schools in Tehran (schools are segregated in Iran) and presented Café Roshd to its students. By all accounts Café Roshd project with 13 students of 15 years old, and as sub-projects of café, journalism and online media project with 5 students of 14 years old, and programming and web design project with 12 students of 14 years old were launched.

After 6 months and in the end, Café Roshd hosted thousands of visitors in school 2-day festival with success in almost all the areas. Music, movie production, foods and drinks, experiencing a business model, designing and sewing dresses, building physical spaces and greenbelt, artistic design inside the café, customer orientation, practicing journalism, web design and programming, beside soft and social skills, were direct experiences and products achieved at the end by the students.