REACT - Radical Education: A Long-Term Training Course for Educators

Building on the first experience of “Radical Education - A Pilot Training Course for Educators Exploring Alternative Educational Practices” (2025, EJBW Weimar), this Long-Term Training Course (REACT) offers a deep 11-month active learning journey for educators.

The course is designed as a hybrid process, seamlessly integrating a permanent online dimension, intensive residential seminars for collective experimentation, and a dedicated local phase where participants implement educational work in their own contexts. The content moves from the personal to the systemic, starting with self-clarification and the exploration of diverse visions of the world. Participants will engage with the thoughts of radical thinkers to examine our everyday relationship with the world and the transformation of power relationships. By looking beyond the "end of history" paradigm, the REact training course invites participants into utopia-making and a deep dive into the intentionalities of radical education. This conceptual work is directly applied to ongoing practices, supporting educators in making their current work more radical-coherent.

This process provides a platform for educators to not only explore bold ideas but to develop, test, and showcase educational practices through the lens of Radical Education, aiming to foster critical consciousness and collective action. The journey concludes with a showcase at an international event, followed by the release of a collective publication, systematizing the content, process, reflections and practices developed during the course.

Objectives:

• To create a protected, reflective, and collaborative space for educators to deeply engage with radical thinking.
• To develop and refine educational practices that address systemic issues and utopia-making.
• To provide a structured environment for peer-led experimentation of radical education tools and practices.
• To support the implementation of local educational initiatives with a radical thinking approach through peer support circles.
• To showcase developed practices to the wider youth work sector.
• To produce a collective publication addressing Radical Education for Educators, systematizing the LTTC process, including the different consolidated educational practices developed by participants, as a critical contribution for the European Youth sector

Target Group:

Radical education is - as Paulo Freire writes - "a task for radicals".

This activity is targeted to educators from Erasmus+ programme countries (18+) working directly with young people, whether at local or other level, through educational practices addressing  one or more of the so-called structural issues such as, but not limited to: racism, postcolonial imagination, patriarchy, ecofeminism, climate change, eco-crisis, LGBTQI+, de-growth, anti-disablism and autonomy, anti-capitalism, horizontal leaderships and the commons, intersectionality, civil disobedience, utopia-making.

Participants must be ready to develop their practice as a space for radical thinking and committed to follow-up action, also ready to commit to the full duration of the whole process (July 2026 – May 2027) as well as to the hybrid character of the process.  

Priority of participation is given to:

• Educators non-established in international youth work routines, who wish to develop their practice as a space for radical thinking;
• Individuals from non-EU backgrounds and the Global South living in Erasmus+ countries.
• A strong commitment to follow-up action is highly valorised, both in the sending organizations (if one) and candidates;