Facilitating Intercultural Learning in Work with Youth Groups

Training course on Facilitation & Intercultural Learning
Vilnius, Lithuania

The training will take place in the Training centre Daugirdiškės (Vilnius county)

Saturday July 22 (arrival) – Monday, July 30 (departure). The training course is 7 full days.

SEAL CYPRUS will participate with 3 people

“Facilitating intercultural learning in work with youth groups” is a training course that gathers together 31 youth worker, youth leader, an educator from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Romania, Croatia, Italy, and Cyprus in Lithuania to improve competencies that are essential in work with young people. “EU youth programmes have created space for young people’s learning through personal experience.” (Novosadova, 2015). Some of these experiences are facilitated, others may give an impression of accidental or a given. For example, the intercultural learning or learning with and from the group in a learning mobility is often taken for granted, as “it will happen anyway”. While it is nice to have a piece of magic in the learning activities, we believe that an educator should master the magic tricks and use them wisely to steer the group to where he or she wants them to be. Group processes happen in youth exchanges, camps, training courses or seminars regardless of the preparation of facilitator. Though the “ability to utilise certain group processes for educative purposes is a great strength.” (Gailius et al., 2013) Therefore, with this training course, we are willing to improve the strength of youth workers and youth leaders in understanding and utilising intercultural group processes for educative purposes and to give them tools to get a grip on these rather intangible aspects and to show them to the broader community.

AIM

To support and empower youth workers and youth leaders through developing competencies needed to facilitate the learning process of intercultural groups of young people.

OBJECTIVES

To develop an understanding of group processes and their effect on learning;
To improve professional competences of participants which will help them to facilitate activities with young people with learning-oriented approach;
To improve participants’ competencies to plan, run and evaluate exercises on intercultural learning;
Develop an understanding of the importance of reflection in educational activities and provide participants with the competence of guiding reflection process of youngsters: designing reflection questions and running the process;
To improve participants’ competencies to adjust, adapt and create new methods based on non-formal education methodology that are in line with the current stage of the group dynamics;
To introduce focus groups as a tool for investigating intercultural learning process and its impact on young people;
To create space for future Erasmus+ projects development and ensuring the quality of the projects through developing a common understanding of Youth project quality criteria: non-formal education, intercultural learning, and impact.

METHODOLOGY

The training course is based on non-formal education methodological principles, experiential learning, holistic education and includes group work, individual consultations, reflection, inclusive presentations, learning by doing, etc.

EXPECTED RESULTS

Improved competencies of youth workers and youth leaders to run educational activities, facilitate intercultural learning in groups and to research the learning process of young people. All of this will have an impact on improved quality of youth work, promoting holistic, non-instrumental and non-formal attitudes towards youth work in participating organisations, the local communities and Europe overall.

SELECTION PROCEDURE

Fill the application form “Application_Local participants_activity abroad” and send it to sealcyprus@gmail.com with the subject “Training on Facilitation in Lithuania”.

Project title: Facilitating Intercultural Learning in Work with Youth Groups
Programme: Erasmus+
Key Action: Learning Mobility of Individuals
Action Type: Youth mobility
Training Course
Project identification/ contract number: 2018-1-LT02-KA105-005810
Dates of the activity: 22- 30 July 2018
Place: Vilnius, LITHUANIA
Coordinator: VšĮ Jaunimo Epicentras
Number of participants from SEAL CYPRUS: 3