Digital Youth

11 – 20 October 2017

Antalya, Turkey

35 Participants 

Turkey, Germany, Poland, Greece, Slovakia, Italy, Czech Republic

In today’s digital age, youth workers should be able and ready to react to the new demands, challenges and opportunities it brings. It is becoming more and more important to have the ability to work with audiovisual materials and make professional documentation of activities in all areas of humans’ work – including youth work. Also, audiovisual materials are not only a way to promote youth work, but also a very effective tool – activities of shooting videos or taking pictures are more and more common.
With this training we aim to promote the idea of audiovisual technology and media as a part of youth-worker’s daily work and as a source of many great opportunities. We want to increase awareness of the fact, that audiovisual technology can be very effectively used as a tool in non-formal education of young people and a great method to develop many of their skills. The training is based on experiential learning approach – the participants will experience different activities with audiovisual technology and then they will develop the skills to use the same or similar activities with their young people.
We then want to spread this idea by organizing more projects on this topic with the help of the praticipants from this training. They will also carry out follow up activities in their sending organizations to share their experiences with their colleagues and peers.
The training course will gather around 30 participants (youth workers) in order to work together on the topic. We also want to address topics such as intercultural learning, sense of initiative, gender equality, etc. We want to explore the idea to use audiovisual technology also as a method of promoting these topics amongst young people.
More specifially, we want to introduce audioviusal technology as a tool that develops greater understanding and appreciation of diversity and promote inclusion in society.
Objectives:
1. Exploring the concept of audiovisual technology as a powerful NFL tool to promote positive social changes in society.
2. Identifying a set of competences to be developed in young people in order to promote greater appreciation of diversity and promote inclusion in society.
3. Deepening awareness about the designing and implementing NFL activities that generate high quality learning outcomes.
4. Training skills of participants on using already existing activities and design new ones for developing in young people concrete competences for D&I.
5. Transferring the learning outcomes of the training to young people by implementing at least 2 follow-up activities (by using 2 activities) with local youngsters in each participating country and by promoting the manual developed during the training among youth work practicioners
Although neither audiovisual technology as tool, nor the need  to promote inclusion and diversity are anything new in youth work, the added value of this project lies within the fact that none of our 8 organizations within the partnership has consciously been using it in order to achieve positive social changes.  Also, there is NO educational material available for it, so, we see it as a crucial contribution for youth work field to develop this area and share the powerful ideas that we would use during the training in a manual that we will call “Digital Youth”.
 
LINK TO E+ PRIORITIES
 
The project clearly meets two general objectives of youth part of Erasmus+:  improving the competencies of people that work with young people (and has a clear transfer of these skills on young people later on) and improving the quality of youth work (especially because it has a good innovation potential and concrete follow-up dimension).
 
By improved competencies of participants of our organizations, the project strengthens our organizational capacities and through established international contacts it improves our organizations’ international cooperation (we expect also some future E+ projects as a follow-up).
 
The theme of the project is very relevant, because it tackles a hot topic in Europe (priority of 2017) – how to accept and live in diversity. Developing the skills of youth workers to act as intercultural learning and inclusion promoters and involving in it also young people is fulfilling another objective – to promote active participation in the society.
 
Inclusion and Diversity Strategy for Youth is emphasizing that to achieve greater inclusion in society it is highly important not only to work on concrete inclusion actions of youth, but to develop also competences of young people and youth workers to appreciate, support and promote differences in society.

Learning Outcomes

The project, though its flow and programme aims to work with the participants’ competences in several directions: knowledge, skills,  behaviour, attitudes and values
 
We expect participants with different profile – some of them will be more experienced than others. As a result of this, expected learning outcomes might be different too. But the main competences developed will be:
• Greater awareness about the needs of young people in different countries in relation to accepting and appreciating diversity and promoting inclusion
• More clear view on what are concrete competences that are crucial to develop in young people in order to promote diversity and inclusion
• Developed awareness about the power and potential of audiovisual technology as a tool for positive social change and enhanced motivation to apply it in youth work
– Enhanced digital competences in many ways
– The ability to shoot a short movie, cut it and add music
– The ability to take high quality photos
– Theoretical knowledge on how to promote their partner organization and make it more visible
– Greater awareness about Turkish culture and being able to appreciate diversity
• Deeper understanding of Experiential Learning Approach (and debriefing) and how to apply it for youth work
• Greater awareness about non-formal learning and youth work in different national contexts – through exchange of experiences with colleagues from other countries and organizations
• Skills to document the NFL learning activities to be shared with other colleagues
• Developed creativity – working in the creative environment and developing and testing new ideas
• International team cooperation skills and practicing accepting diversity – by working together in teams and developing common tools
• Reflection on own style as a youth worker and promoter of inclusion and diversity and developed motivation to improve the quality of their work
• Self-initiative and “small project management” skills – planning and implementing at least 2 follow-up activities using audiovisual technology for local young people involving inclusion&diversity
• Greater understanding and respect for diversity and cultural differences (as the project will be gathering people from very different countries) and breaking prejudices about people coming from different regions and backgrounds and being able to engage in (intercultural) dialogue in a constructive way and ability to transfer the positive (inter-cultural) learning outcomes to young people in own community.
 
The organization team:

Levent Arslan & Maja Svobodova

Kultur & Art Initiative e.V and TOM Dumánci: We are the ones taking care of organization and programme of the training. We’re looking forward to having you here and will make sure you enjoy your stay.

Don’t hesitate to contact us: maja.svobodova@email.cz