Aug 13 2010
d) Anna Lindh Foundation
Developing a training course to enhance the intercultural capacity of youth workers and educators
If you have looked closely at Richard’s pages, you will have noticed that he has a long-standing collaboration with Leah Davcheva in Bulgaria. After many years managing intercultural projects for the British Council in Bulgaria, Leah now has her own intercultural consultancy called Aha Moments! http://www.ahamoments.eu/
Aha Moments’ latest project
Aha Moments is the lead partner in a new collaborative project with partners from six other European and Mediterranean countries – Egypt, Germany, Jordan, Spain, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The project is co-financed by the Anna Lindh Foundation. It started in September 2009 and will continue for ten months. MA participant Rachel Lindner is the project partner from Germany.
The main objective of the project is to enhance the capacity of youth workers to guide young people’s intercultural learning so that they can better achieve their goals in new contexts – for example when participating in international youth or university mobility programmes, when studying or working abroad, etc.
At present, materials and guidelines for developing the intercultural awareness of youth workers are missing. To begin filling this gap, the project seeks to produce online learning materials and resources which can be used freely by youth workers and educators in the participating countries. Using this online platform will help educators and trainers in this area to develop their own specific intercultural competencies and understand better the needs of the young people they work with. This will affect positively youth and university mobility programmes by reducing occurrences of miscommunication, misunderstanding or prejudice related to intercultural issues.
The project involves a series of needs analyses in all participating countries, joint meetings and seminars to develop the materials and resources. More details will be published after finalising the activities schedule with all project partners.
For more information contact: Leah Davcheva, +359 2 9671063; +359 899 963623; leah@ahamoments.eu
Here is the latest draft of the initial, expectations-setting introduction to the resource which the project is developing. Any feedback would be welcome.
MOBILITY for Young People: An awareness-raising programme for facilitators
* A resource for youth workers in their many diverse roles
We hope that this professional development resource will be of value for all who work with young people – youth workers, educators, and youth group facilitators. Many different roles are included here: some of us prepare young people for participation in a school trip abroad, others coordinate university ERASMUS-type schemes, others still work with young refugees and migrant workers, and, as a final example, some aim to bridge ethnic and religious divides and facilitate conflict resolution through youth work.
* Helping youth workers support young people
Contemporary living is increasingly complex and many challenges and opportunities result from this. On the one hand, our local environments now carry influences of ideas, products, behaviours, and values originating elsewhere; and, on the other, our horizons are becoming increasingly broad and distant. For many of us, the local is being globalised and the global is becoming localised. It is in this global-local environment that our young people develop, within which they participate, and to which they contribute. The skills and awarenesses they need for this differ from those of earlier generations. If we who support them are to be fully effective, we ourselves need to fully understand these newer skills and awareness. And we need to be clearer about how we can help young people develop them. This resource seeks to help all youth workers become more confidently competent as they provide intercultural training focusing on the above challenges and opportunities.
* Approaches to intercultural trainingIntercultural training often takes a ‘cultural approach’. It focuses on information about the countries to which the young people are travelling for study or other purposes. But often there is a mismatch between, on the one hand, the complexities of the environments in which our young people live, and, on the other, the over-generalisations in the training materials. Is cultural training based on national, regional, ethnic, gender, and/or religious understandings adequate for the contemporary world? We think not. Instead, we approach the complexities of living in the contemporary world through the concept of ‘mobility’.
* An understanding of mobility
‘Mobility’ is usually associated with physical movement, for example movement across borders. But, we believe that mobility for young people may also involve moves into otherness through online communications or through the media, literature and film. Further, for some young people, mobility represents an opportunity – the freedom to choose where to study and work, and with whom to associate. For others, it may involve the struggle to overcome the constraints that society, tradition, and politics, for example, place upon them. Mobility is not only what happens when young people move between countries, but also the step they make to understand and decide to stand out for the rights of their peers. Mobility is what young people require of their parents and elders when trespassing against dominant values such as those governing sexuality and morality. Mobility can make young people realise how privileged they are but also realise how discriminated against they may be.
* Meeting a challenging training agenda
Above all, if they are to play a full, valued, and respectful part in their local, national and international contexts, young people need ‘psychological mobility’. They need this for their encounters with cultural otherness. But psychological mobility also lies at the heart of the respect for fundamental human rights and the engagement with the challenges of inequality and conflict. When mobility is viewed like this, the training agenda can seem daunting. We hope that this resource plays a small part in reducing this challenge.
This project is now complete. Its key output is an online self-study intercultural learning resource. http://ahamoments.eu/moodle/
Mobility for young people has been created for facilitators of mobility programmes for young people to help them gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that face the mobile young people they work with. The intercultural aspects of the phenomenon are explored from different and sometimes unusual angles.