Outdoor experiential learning - for beginners

WHY?

There are countless researches on the power of nature to reduce stress, improve mood, increase creativity and promote general human well-being. Although also in youth work and education field there are more and more initiatives appearing that promote being outdoors, using this as a conscious educational approach is still very under-developed.

We believe that with the motivation and skills of youth workers and educators, even seemingly simple activities outdoors can be very attractive for the involvement of young people and generate powerful learning outcomes. So, this potential should be more widely used by youth work practitioners to give young people better opportunities to learn.

AIM

With this training course, we want to give chance for 24 youth workers, educators, and youth leaders that work with young people on the daily basis to experience the power of learning in/from the nature and outdoor approach for personal and social development and motivate them to use it more often in work with young people.

OBJECTIVES

Exchanging challenges of youth work at the local level and identifying how OEL could be used as an effective NFL approach and tool for promoting the personal development of youngsters, cooperation with peers, inclusion, and becoming more connected to the community and surroundings.
Providing a space for youth workers to “live through” OEL activities in nature and thus allowing them to experience the power of such learning in order to motivate them to use this approach for their daily youth work.
Raising confidence and skills of youth workers to design and facilitate NFL activities with OEL elements and provide tools that later on could be easily adapted for local youth work needs.
Implement concrete follow-up activities in each country (within 2 months after the training) and agree on starting to use OEL as a regular approach to reaching the young people in the community.

APPROACH

To make the learning more powerful and transformational, during this training course we have chosen to combine more common non-formal learning methods with Outdoor Experiential Learning (OEL) and hiking experience in nature in Croatia.

This will allow, on the one hand, to connect with oneself, with each other, and the world around on a deeper level. On the other hand, being in nature for an extended period of time allow experiencing situations that are out of comfort zone thus creating a great chance for learning.

OUTDOORS, but NOT EXTREME!

While we DO plan that approximately half of the program activities will be implemented in nature /outdoors, it will not be based on physically hard survival types of activities that require very specific equipment, skills, and experiences.

We believe that strong effects of learning in nature can be reached without pushing oneself to the extremes!

In this training, we want to put emphasis on developing sensitivity and making relationships with nature closer. Nevertheless, we believe that this is nothing extreme if you are prepared for it. And it is surely great learning!

To avoid situations, when participants experience great things during the training, but then they go home and don't feel confident to use the same approaches, we also want to make sure that all the methods we try out during the training are easy to transfer to all (youth work) realities and do not require specific outdoor skills.

PARTICIPANTS

• Teachers, social workers, youth workers, peer-leaders, youth organization/club activists, scout leaders, educators, etc.
• Working with young people (13-30 years old; not children) in schools and/or in a non-formal education system (as volunteers or paid workers) on a regular basis
• Interested in exploring the power of learning outdoors/in nature for developing Emotional Intelligence and young peoples’ mental and physical well-being
• Ready to organize follow-up activities using the experience from this training (individually or together with another person from the same country) within 3 months after the training
• Ready to prepare 1 post/article for publicity to share results from the training and applying EI in their daily youth work
• Committed to learning and working together for quite long hours every day and being outdoors
• Aged 18+
• Good skills of communication in English