Cooperative GAmes and ICL

Aims & objectives

The plan to do this training together came up during the Contact Making Seminar „Young Migrants and Media“ in April 2003 in Innsbruck. Participants from Spain, Romania, France and Austria agreed to develop together a plan for a training course dealing with Intercultural Learning.

It was identified as a need by 3 initial partner groups (Spain, Romania and Austria) to run such an “experiential training” with the intention to get more assurance and confidence to run complex group games, to adapt games if needed, and to perhaps develop some new exercises together.

This training provided practical tools that will make an exchange project attractive and fun, and at the same time allowed to transport methodical aspects of learning, help raising awareness of (inter)cultural behaviour and support developing the ability to differenciate.

Target group & international/intercultural composition of the group & team

In the development of the training idea, it was decided to invite more partners and now we have 20 participants from 9 countries, involving 5 EU-countries and 4 EU-candidate countries.

The preparation was done via intensive email and telephone contact. After having developed a common draft in the planning group (organisations and trainers), we invited to join in these partners who had showed interest to participate.
We kept the close email contact before the start of the training.

Training methods used & main activities

The training of Cooperative Games will be eminently practical and the work will consist in experiencing games and other activities with cooperative character.
At the same time the philosophy of cooperative work will be analyzed and discussed.
In this way we practise participation, team work, communication and analysis of situations, while enjoying an atmosphere of release and solidarity.
The training course is built on the interests of the participants and each of them will contribute his/her ideas about how to use these activities in his/her own professional working area.

This means, in terms of methods:

- educational approach, structured, planned process, but flexibility / variety of forms
- cooperative approach, self-organisation and sharing responsibility, involvement
- holistic (head, heart, hands)
- based on needs
- possibility to learn from mistakes (taking into account failure /success )
- collective effort of understanding the learning process: assessment/evaluation

Outcomes of the activity

Action 1

youth exchanges:
- music bands exchange
- dj, hip-hop, drums

• new musicians exchange ( Ilze)
• exchange music and sports ( Teresa)
• art, music and nature free expression in 1-2 years ( Daniela)
• youth exchange of music bands, hosting in Italy ( Elmar)
• exchange of yougsters from YMC ( youth meeting centres) with the topic hip-hop ( break-dance, graffitti, djs, free style rap) ( Tomek)

• dj/hip-hop/ rock exchange ( Carlos)
• exchange about cultural and social differences, with the goal of integration. It can be done by theatre, music, dance, etc. ( Marja)
• Spain hosts !!! multilateral exchange – rural youngsters: dj, graffitti, percusion ( Marina,Quique)
• band exchange with two bands – sending ( Martina)

Your tasks and responsibilities within the team

Full time trainer and coresponsible in training content design

I worked on this training for 5 days as a full time trainer.