TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Roi Guitián
RecThink Hackathon was the last training of an Erasmus+ KA2 project named RecThink. This project focused on young people from rural areas facing depopulation and it aimed to involve them in the process of rethinking themselves, as well as their role in the future of their localities.
This training was the last one of a project in which Participatory Video was the methodology chosen to develop audiovisual and multimedia contents as a tool to express and generate ideas. During this 5 days participants watched and discussed about the documentaries done by the groups of each partner country . After that, through an active experience of peer learning, the group also developed competences on ICT and were able to develop contents and structure for a webdoc.
All in all, this creation activity helped them to think about themselves and the role they play on their community. The training aimed to encourage youngsters to be more active and this was achieved by watching, reflecting, sharing and showing the challenges they faced and the alternatives the had while developing competences on video creation, edition and photography.
During 5 days, YUPI organization hosted in Portugal 15 youngsters from Portugal and Spain that were part of Rec-Think project in their countries.
Trainers team was also international, with one trainer from Portugal and two from Spain.
The idea of this 5-days activity was to reinforce previous activities within the project by training young people to be active agents in political and economical transformation processes, through the development of digital and communicative skills.
As this was the last training of this project, all participants has already experienced a participatory video process. Based on that, we facilitated a Media Creation Lab, in which they worked in small international groups aimed to deliver small outputs: poster design, trailer editing, text writing, image curator, etc.. Their roles were exchanged every day so they all did various tasks. At the end of each day, they had to see what the groups were doing and how they could improve the results.
During this process they had to use their language, dialogue and consensus skills as every decision affected to the output. Also, they had to improve the creativity and digital skills in order to deliver a quality product. Through discussions and facilitated design thinking activities, they all decided how they wanted to build their web-doc.
Thus, with this methodology digital & personal competences were increased while the participants were challenged to share, reflect and rethink about the place where they live. During this non formal learning process the group discussed about the reasons of depopulation, similarities and potentialities of rural areas in Portugal, Spain, France and Italy and re-thought alternatives and strategies to struggle against depopulation.
During the training, partcipants gained interpersonal and digital storytelling skills, as mentioned in the previous answer. Also, in group it was developed a process of generation of ideas and actions that the participants could develop in the places where they live, in order to turn the rural areas more attractive, generating local impact and positive changes in their communities. Indeed, some small initiatives started in this rural areas after the trainig.
Also, the webdoc built during the activity was published:
https://r9a3d34717.racontr.com/home.html
There's a blog with contents of the training (and previous trainings of the project):
https://recthink.tumblr.com/
The project was selected within the most significant projetcs for "Culture and Citizenship" of 2016 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and was showcased in Madrid:
https://twitter.com/i/events/788325365571805184
https://culturayciudadania.culturaydeporte.gob.es/encuentro-cultura-ciudadania/2016-redirige/presentacion.html
There's also this post in our website:
http://recthink.eu/en/2016/08/03/the-hackaton-in-portugal/
Therefore this project, and the training itself, wanted young people to give voice to their region, breaking the geographical isolation and building an european collaborative network to reflect on the rural areas, their communities and their future in the european citizenship.
To sum up, Rec Think is a trip where the way is the objective,
WebDoc:
We were a group of three trainers. Claudia, from YUPI, was part of the hosting organization and was in charge with all the logistics. Also, she was the one leading the icebreaking and teambuilding activities during the first day and also during the last, the evaluation day.
Me, together with María (another media trainer), were in charge of facilitating the creative process. This means that we previously designed the milestones for the creative process, foresee the resources and timing they will need to create the process, and created a challenging but feasible itinerary for a non-professional group of youngsters.
Once the creation activity started, as a facilitator, I was there providing support and advice if demanded, and also helping if they were running out of ideas with creative decisions.
Also, I had to be aware of small deadlines so all the group was working and to provoke discussions so the could go in-deep into the topic.