TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Alexandro Jan Lai
Pathways to Youth Leadership was a long-term training project that offered a systematic approach to developing youth leadership competences. The project wanted to answer and unpack the question: how do I become a youth leader? The project worked on a variety of levels, that include innovation, theory to practice and experiential learning. It followed two professional personal development models for young leaders and those new to youth work, that explore pathways and progression to become a youth worker. One called ‘Cultivate’, a leadership training programme built around UK Youth Achievement Awards Platinum, and the other the Dutch model ‘Effective Youth Leadership Badges’, based on the work and the models identified by Stephen Covey.
Main Objectives were: to develop a greater understanding of the transferrable skills and experiences for youth work; to explore and understand the skills, knowledge and attitude of youth leadership; to gain a greater awareness of youth work theory and practice; to identify and realise youth leadership experiences and opportunities; to explore the opportunities for realising their youth work potential through Erasmus+.
The project involved participants from 12 different countries (6 from Programme Countries, 3 from MEDA and 3 from SEE): young adults, those new to youth work, ex-beneficiaries of Erasmus+ (either youth exchanges or EVS) and young people looking to step up a level.
The trainers team included, besides me, one colleague from the Netherlands and 3 from UK.
Detailed list of countries: Italy, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Greece, Lebanon, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Palestine, Serbia, Spain, United Kingdom
The training implemented a range of experiential learning opportunities, non-formal educational approaches and a wealth of youth work theory and practice. We had the innovative opportunity to complete the pedagogical structure of the project with a new tool to support learning: the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchanges (EVE). As examples to mention for the purpose of this form, we developed a simulation game called "Game of Stones" based on the "Prisoner Dilemma" with 4 teams aiming to achieve more co-operative behavior between team members and teams, who are pursuing shared goals.
The objective is described as a group task to win as much as you can. The 4 teams inevitably
compete and therefore the group score is low.
We also used the "Leary’s Rose: Behavior Types" model to explore different behavior patterns in youth leadership and the "Bidibibodybibu" game to assess the importance of different roles in team work.
The project has been chosen as a "Good Practice Example" by the Italian National Agency for its success in involving the young participants and in supporting their leadership skills development. Having been the first one to test Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange in the non formal education field, the project has become rapidly a best practice in the use of blended mobility learning. It appeared in the RAI TV news and in several international events such as: the first edition of the "European Academy of Youth Work" in Slovenia (May 2019), a webinar hosted by UNICollaboration to promote EVE among youth organisations (11/04/19), the seminar "Building bridges between youth in the digital era" (21/02/20 in Brussels) and the conferences "Exploring the digital Dimension of Youth workers’ competences" (February 2020 in Vienna) and "MOVE IT-Youth mobility in the digitalised era" (May 2020) in Bonn.
It has also been portrayed in the publication of the 2018 results of EVE and it will appear in a next publication from the consortium on the best practices across Europe.
Last but not the least a follow up project written by some of the participants themselves has been approved in the May 2020 deadline by the German NA.
In the first mobility of the 2 residential ones I took a coordinator role as the TC was hosted in my town. I delivered a few learning modules as trainer but my main role has been to coordinate the TC in general (logistics, participants travels, administration...). I was instead purely involved as trainer in the mobility in Serbia where we worked full time as a team of 4 trainers and one digital rapporteur dividing tasks and participants into groups and activities we all engaged in full time. We alternated between team leader and team member depending on the specific activity proposed or worked in parallel by dividing the participants in smaller groups. Each one of us filled all the roles and we all shared responsibility for the designing of the agenda, its implementation and the daily evaluations.
Besides the tasks in the residential mobilities I and another colleague took responsibility for planning and running all the Virtual Exchanges implemented during the project for a total of 6 Virtual Exchanges. My role in the online setting has been of facilitator of the digital dialogue and designer of the agenda's content.