TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Tatsiana Petrachkova Bauder
The project was pursuing an attempt to change the perspective, and therefore vision about possibilities
and view on limitations, for young people whose learning, communicating and behavioural patterns
differ from their peers. We hoped to bring youth workers (generalist) and people working specially with young people with psychosocial and cognitive conditions(specialists) together to exchange
practices and develop an innovative holistic and cooperative approach on young people’s deviant
competence development and learning style in order to increase inclusion in their communities.
The objectives of the project were:
@ To develop a cross-sectorial discourse of deviant competences, where youth workers (generalists)
and social workers (specialists) can develop their professional competences on the
inclusion of young people with psychosocial and cognitive conditions;
@ To encourage new clusters of stakeholders to cooperate on the learning approach and socializing
of young people, by seeing all young people as their own specialists;
@ To raise awareness about special learning conditions and learning capacities;
@ To enrich and equip youth workers with understanding and tools to work with deviant competences;
@ To promote cooperation between ‘narrow’ specialists working with deviant competences and
youth workers, using both their knowledge and experiences in order to develop opportunities
to include young people with psychosocial and cognitive conditions in their local communities;
@ To increase the quality of youth work regarding inclusion processes;
@ To promote Erasmus+ as a tool of further development of young people’s and youth workers’
professional and social skills.
The project brought together 20 specialists and youth workers from 4 countries: Sweden, Netherlands,
Italy and Turkey. The trainers were from Sweden and Holland.
One of the activities was a study visit where 15 places of interest were visited and discussed. Another two were strategy planning meeting and a training course.
We also used methods within non-formal learning methodology like quests, games, discussion groups, group and individual reflection sessions, creative sessions, team building and group exercises with analysis and reflection; co-creation and peer evaluation.
All objective of the training were achieved, and a lot of insights were made for future continuous work on the topic. A non-project bound group of specialists was created for further work in the topic. Here is a wrap up video from the activities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RfyPoteDW4
Planning and conducting the sessions, contact and support of the participants, evaluation and reporting.