TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Dagna Gmitrowicz
The main aim was to equip youth leaders and youth workers with approaches, techniques and tools to evoke, develop and support entrepreneurial attitudes and skills of young people and help them to be active through Transnational Youth Initiatives.
To build a broader understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation with regard to the challenges facing young people
To introduce methods and approaches of supporting young people in developing their entrepreneurial attitude
To raise interest in carrying out Transnational Youth Initiative projects as a way of developing initiative and entrepreneurial skills and employability in young people
To share and develop ideas for generating Transnational Youth Initiatives and facilitating cooperation among participants
To create space for building partnerships
Team composition:
Dagna Gmitrowicz and Jonathan Bowyer
with Martyna Kozłowska
24 participants came together from 11 Programme Countries. They were all people who work with young people to wake-up and develop initiative, entrepreneurship and innovation and they came from community groups, NGOs, community centers, youth clubs, schools, public institutions, cultural institution. They were all also willing to cooperate with young people in preparing and carrying out Transnational Youth Initiatives.
The training was based on the principles and practice of non-formal education taking into account participants’ needs, motivations and experiences. A variety of methods were used to allow involvement of participants with different learning styles and to ensure a balance between theory and practice.
The land with no map. Using the metaphor we were modeling.
„According to Richards, metaphor is fundamentally a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts. It requires two ideas which cooperate in an inclusive meaning; they interact or "interpenetrate" each another with meaning (Wheelwright, 1968). In this view, it is the differences, not the similarities between tenor and vehicle which are significant. Haynes (1975) believes that the new insights provided by a good metaphor suggest further questions, "tempting us to formulate hypotheses which turn out to be . experimentally fertile" (p. 274). She suggests that good metaphors can literally lead to reasoning by analogy. Authors who emphasize a psychological approach to metaphor regard metaphoric thinking as a creative activity (cf. Brunner, 1957; Rothenberg, 1979, 1984).” The use of metaphor Eliezer Wirtztum M.D., Onno van der Hart Ph.D., Barbara Friedman M.A., M.F.C.C.
The land with no map metaphor was to explore the techniques, approaches and possibilities with an openness to unpredictability. We found out, that people very often are projecting and using old methods to answer new challenges.
Each session can be connected with the certain stage of cooperation with young person. Each session is putting emphasis on the particular role of youth worker, not being the leader, but being the facilitator of empowerment, assistant.
There was a general assumption: with nowadays economical challenges we don't know how to act, we can't predict a future.
Participants could co facilitate and co create the process.
After the training participants were able:
To use various tools and approaches to wake up a spirit of initiative and entrepreneurialism in young people,
To support young people on their entrepreneurial journey in the context of ambiguity and uncertainty,
To cooperate with young people in creating ideas for local projects that can be carried out in the frame of Transnational Youth Initiatives in the Erasmus+ Programme
To benefit from new contacts and possible partners for future cooperation.
I had a privilege to be a co-trainer of this event.