Le Barbe della Gioconda

Proposed methodology (that has been imported from Latin America in Italy with great success since 2005) is the “Ludopedagogy”, which did develop to fight against Latin America dictatorships summing the strategic element of "playing" to the experience of Freire's Popular Education to advocate and promote a society based on the respect of human dignity and freedom, building awareness for Human Rights and the capacity to work for a human scale development, that is sustainable and based on participation. This method facilitates the educational work, by involving the participants and encourages the opening towards a different attitude, different from the usual one, stimulates the curiosity and the necessity to recognize the different, the “other”. The “game” manages to develop the willing to get in to it, to actively participate, to risk, to discover yourself and the world around you, to discover the power to build another possible and necessary world.

To pursue these aims, the Association did (in the past beeng the italian branch of the "Latin América Network of Game" - Red Latinoamericana de Juego - ReLaJo) and will now carry on, among others, the following activities: to organize seminars, conferences, pedagogical courses and trainings; to establish relations of collaboration with other Italian and foreign organizations, having local, national and international nature, with similar aims, to mutually exchange best practices and facilitate contacts among the organizations themselves.
Finally, "Le barbe della Gioconda" is willing to set up a multi-country project to promote the power of playing in order to build a different kind of participation: from youths to the adult's institutions.

The main objectives of the activity are:
1. To strengthen the capacities of public institutions and local associations working on social issues and dedicated to youth participation by training their staff and volunteers (trainers, teachers, youth promoters) on the basis of "Ludopedagogy as a strategic tool for social work and youth participation".
2. To promote the exchange of best practices and the cooperation between youth organisations of different countries which are working with or are willing to implement participative methodologies in order to better involve and train young people as promoters of intercultural dialogue and peaceful transformation of conflicts with a human rights perspective.

The courses and training sessions in “Ludopedagogy” is using a no formal and experiential methodology, aim to strength the strategic capacities to empower youth participation on subjects like: emigration, exclusion and discrimination; wars, violence and violations of the Human Rights; contexts of privatization and weaknesses of the Social State, principally concerning the right to education and health; the abuse of the authorities and the gender and generational discrimination; barriers and conflicts; consumerism, corruption and imposition of a kind of development purely economic, that is not sustainable nor at an environment level nor at a social level for the discriminated and poor classes.