Students plan and organize a Repair Café where they invite other students, teachers or the local community to repair broken or worn items instead of throwing them away. The Repair Café can focus on clothes, bikes and scooters, toys or other everyday products.
The intention is for students to experience how repairing can be an alternative to overconsumption and to gain experience in practical problem solving and collaboration.
Talk to students about why it is important to repair instead of throwing away. Introduce the concept of the repair café. Students agree on what they will (could) repair.
In pairs or small groups, students take a look at Repair Café – Part 1 to learn more about how they organize repair cafés. Students also look for videos on the internet to get more visual images of how it might work in practice. They record their ideas and inputs along the way.
With their partner and the Brainstorming method, students write down concrete needs for repair (e.g. holes, buttons, zippers) that they can imagine needing to be repaired.
They make a table with 2 columns: materials (e.g. sewing thread, needle, sewing machine, scraps of clothing for patches), and skills needed (e.g. being able to patch a hole or sew on buttons), and fill it in.
Using the Weaving Together method, students in class create an overall table of materials and skills. They talk about how they will ensure they have the necessary skills to repair – and whether they need to learn any techniques beforehand.
Students start Brainstorming together about possible roles to take on and what groups need to be set up to fulfill them. They distribute the tasks between them. This can be e.g. repair group, documentation group (photos and video), marketing group, host and logistics group, etc.
| Create | Act |