TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Anton Toshev
Learning to resolve conflicts with peers is an essential skill for European youth. At Alter Network, we have found that role play, puppets, and improv theatre are excellent tools for helping young people practice problem-solving and learn key phrases to address challenges. Using puppets to model desirable behaviors provides youth workers with real-life examples to emulate. "Becoming" the mediator through these activities enhances their communication skills, particularly when working with youth from troubled backgrounds.
The key objectives of the project include delivering a training course on nonviolent communication through puppetry to 25 youth workers. This aims to equip participants with a new tool to better tackle challenges faced when working with marginalized groups or youth from troubled homes. The project also seeks to contribute to social inclusion and promote dialogue through new means of communication and art. Additionally, participants will learn the necessary skills to stage a puppet show that educates their community on the method of nonviolent communication during the local phase.
Youth workers aged 20-50 years old, from Bulgaria, Turkey, Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic, Latvia, and Greece.
Our main educational approach is experiential learning and learning by doing. The different processes are designed so that participants first experience the methods themselves, which they will later be trained to use. This is followed by moments of reflection, conclusion, and applying the new knowledge to their own work contexts. This approach is applied to every workshop and the project as a whole, especially during the local phase, which allows participants to bring their new knowledge and methods back to their communities. We use a three-layer system of reflection (individual, small groups, and the big group) to ensure that what the body experiences, the mind processes and applies. During the project, we provided individual coaching to support each team member in their learning journey. To ensure high-quality education, our team held several online meetings to discuss the methods and identify experts who can facilitate this learning. We created experiences aimed at bringing about behavioral change, focusing on the difficulties youth workers face in their work. We trained them not just to use these methods in general but to adapt them to their specific environments. Our training course design began with an analysis of needs to ensure it meets the concrete learning needs of the participants.
During the project, we used various work forms, including reflection circles, learning by doing workshops where participants actively engage in the methods being taught, intercultural learning events in an informal learning setup, brainstorming sessions, simulations, and individual and group feedback sessions. We trained and applied several methods in the training. Puppet-making involves using hand puppets that speak directly from the soul, as they are easier to coordinate and require fewer complex cognitive-motor processes, ensuring that more feelings are conveyed. The puppets chosen by participants often reflect significant parts of their own character. Simulations help participants experience and transform deep-seated emotions by simulating situations in pairs or groups, aligning with our training's assumption that all violent language is a tragic expression of unmet needs.
The Theatre of the Oppressed through puppets, inspired by Augusto Boal's techniques, uses theatre to promote social and political change. Participants, as "spect-actors," actively explore, show, analyze, and transform the reality they live in. Forum Theatre through puppets allows performances to be stopped by actors or audience members to propose solutions to the oppression depicted, making the process dialectic and engaging. Newspaper Theatre transforms daily news articles or non-dramatic pieces into theatrical scenes, while Analytical Theatre involves improvising stories told by participants, then breaking down each character into their social roles and symbolizing them with physical objects.
Nonviolent communication through puppet theatre benefitted the participants and their communities back home in several ways. They learned to speak in a way that inspires compassion and understanding, enabling them to initiate difficult conversations with more ease and confidence. They became better at remaining centered and peaceful while hearing difficult messages, and they discovered how to find the gift underneath anger, transforming it into life-serving energy instead of blasting someone with blame. Additionally, they learned to shift patterns of thinking that lead to depression, guilt, and shame, and to enliven themselves by expressing and receiving gratitude. They gained the ability to translate criticism, judgments, and blame into life-serving messages, resolve long-standing conflicts, and heal painful relationships. Through these skills, they were able to inspire others to change their behavior willingly.
Full time trainer, logistics, transportation and other organisation-related roles before and during the project.