TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Ilaria Zocco
The overall aim of the POWER OF WORDS training is:
★ To develop youth workers’ communication skills in order to better support young people in communication and critical thinking
The specific objectives of the POWER OF WORDS training are:
➔ To create a space where youth workers can develop and practice their communication and critical thinking skills;
➔ To explore the mechanisms of manipulation and discuss how youth workers can support young people in dealing with this;
➔ To give an opportunity to exchange tools, ideas and good practices to work with youth on their critical thinking;
➔ To create creative learning environment for peer learning;
➔ To discuss opportunities media create for youth workers to connect to young people.
Viktória Takács: trainer and communication adviser based in Budapest, Hungary. Her love affair with the field of youth work started more than 10 years ago, and it still lasts. She works mainly for a Hungarian NGO called Foundation for Democratic Youth (DIA), and besides she is also involved in several other civic and educational initiatives. She worked as a coordinator in different community service projects, than she’s been the director of DIA’s debate program for five years, and she also took part in the development of various educational content (trainings, handbooks, etc.). As a trainer, her favourite topics are: debate and argumentation, presentation and public speaking, social innovation and creative planning, non-profit communication.
Martyna Kozłowska-Żukowska: MA in Sociology and Social Policy, trainer coach and project manager, 5-year experience in supporting administration and management of scientific projects, working knowledge on managing the NGO and social projects, 10-year youth work and training experience in multicultural environment in CISV Poland and CISV, International, school for trainers by TROP, participation in social research projects in the field of: sociology, political sciences, market research. I love to lead trainings on communication, team work, conflict and project management, mission, vision and change in the organization.
Ilaria Zocco loves European Union completely! Leonardo project in Slovenia, EVS in Belgium, more that 10 youth exchanges as participat (Serbia, Turkey, Spain, Italy, etc) and several trainings (Cyprus, Spain, etc) and SALTO Trainings (Bulgaria and TOT in different places)
European manager for Erasmus plus (ka1, ka2 and ka3) is attending a Master-degree for new project in Creative Europe… loves dark chocolate and gluten free muffins!
Joakim Arnøy: Likes long walks in the mountain. Thinks non-formal education is pretty cool. Is fond of Africa, but also other places of the world. Like Argentina. Probably. Though he has not been there yet.
1. What skills, attitudes, behaviour knowledge should YW have to support young people in communication?
We start with some definitions:
Attitudes (the youth worker’s willingness) are the pre-requisite, the foundation for competence development. They lead to knowledge (gained through experience, books,the Internet, etc.) and skills (ability to perform a task, to apply knowledge and turn attitudes into actions), which will then lead to appropriate and contextual behaviour.
Youth workers have to know and deepen the “COMPETENCE MODELS OF YOUTH WORKERS” because offering young people the opportunity to join learning mobility projects across Europe require certain competences from those working with and for young people. Specific competences are really needed to support quality development of such European learning mobility activities for youth workers and for young people.
WE CAN ENCLOSE THE MODEL https://www.salto youth.net/downloads/4-17-3460/CompetencemodelForYoutworker_Online-web.pdf
2. How do words shape our personal stories?
This session’s aim was to underline and show our participants how words can influence our personal life and stories. We started this session with little introduction to storytelling and then we gave our participants a chance to write their own Hero’s journey with a little movie introduction to the Hero’s journey methodology. Than we created the opportunity for our participants to share their stories with each other. The interesting part of this exercise was that
3. How communication shape public opinion in political dimension?
Two full sessions were used for a real-life simulation. The scenario was that the local political administration of Konstancin-Jeziorna had called for a referendum whether to dispel the American School of Warsaw, which is, in fact, located in Konstancin-Jeziorna. The simulation had been designed from scratch, with inspiration from the referendum in Turkey shortly before, and the situation in Hungary with regards to the Central European University, among other things. The scenario was introduced, along with the parameters of the simulation. Roles were assigned to each participant, each role describing a little bit who the participant was meant to be, what views they had, and which responsibilities they had in the simulation. The roles included journalists, politicians, citizens, and more. The aim of the simulation was for the participants to be introduced to various perspectives of communication about a concrete event, such as a referendum, forms it takes, consequences of it, and potential counter-actions, as the participants had opposing views in their roles. Among the competences the exercise was designed to promote, were communication skills, critical thinking to mass media and political speech, leadership, and active participation. In addition, the exercise was meant to stimulate the participants into considering the reality faced by young people with regards to policy and narratives.
4. What are the mechanisms of mass media and social media? Martyna
5. How to become a persuasive communicator?
The session was dedicated to the different tools and techniques of effective communication. The participants learned about the basic model of competent public speaking (argument by logic, argument by emotions, argument by character) updated from the rules of ancient rhetorics (logos, pathos, ethos). They also dived a little bit deeper into the techniques of argumentation, and reflected on examples of false argumentation. The session started by a rather entertaining argumentation activity (The balloon exercise), where participants had to convince an audience - this provided a good starting point for discussing the various possible strategies of conviction, and also to discuss concepts about persuasion and manipulation. After an interactive presentation of argumentation techniques the participants engaged in a short two-sided debate to exchange arguments on whether beauty contests should be banned or not.
6. How to be aware of mechanisms of manipulation in rhetorics and how to be critical with false argumentation? After discussing argumentation by logic in the previous session, we reflected on the two other pillars of persuasive speaking: arguments by emotions and the character of the speaker. For this part the movie scenes of the film American Crime Story: People vs O. J. Simpson provided a good input: we analyzed the last speeches that had been delivered at the O. J. Simpson trial. Through these examples the participants learned about how to prepare, structure and deliver a persuasive speech. In the second half of the session the participants engaged in a group activity where they had to develop and deliver persuasive talks (The Lady and the Knight exercise), and this way they had an opportunity to put the newly heard principles about argumentation and persuasion into practice.
7. How to use communication in dissemination?
The most important thing to understand is the difference between impact and dissemination. The impact is the EFFECT that the action or project produces while the dissemination is HOW the information ARE SPREAD AROUND.
Nowadays the dissemination is related to social network, website, mailchimp and the information have to be clear, smart and easly spraeding throught the web but not only … the new idea is to finance the job of a “dissemination manager” that has the responsibilities to promote and advertise the project and its results; in ONG and young association this is a crucial aspect to understand and develop.
8. What are responsibilities of youth workers in their daily work regarding manipulation?
We set up a fishbowl-type exercise (in our case called Camp Fire), to stimulate a bit of discussion about the youth worker’s role. We introduced a few statements, one at the time, with content that was meant to be a bit provoking about youth work. Participants were then invited to approach the campfire to express their views and engage with opposing views if they wanted. The exercise was concluded by a debrief in the plenary.
9. What are the opportunities for financing ideas and how to create networking as youth workers?
There are several opportunities for financing projects at local, Regional, National and European level. We analysed
- Europe for citizens https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/europe-for-citizens_en
- Erasmus plus https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/erasmus-plus_en
- Creative Europe https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/creative-europe_en
For the participants in this training and in particular way for youth workers is very important to understand how they could be supported by EU financing
The training is also an opportunity to create a good networking for next projects
Below follows a selection of the replies to the open-ended evaluation questions (good results)
❖ What do you think about the overall structure of the training?
➢ It has been really well structured, the expectation were as high as the TC has been.
➢ It was super well balanced. I could use the free time everytime and it was s just enough.
➢ too many energizers, long breaks. I wish the sessions to more intensive. I wish the trainers explain before or after exercises "why" it was planned as sometimes it was hard for me to understand what was the aim of some blocks. But in general working and freetime were.in balance.
➢ The balance of time is quite well. I would to have much time for the sections (groups work, simulation, ect)
➢ For me everything was planned perfect and really detailed. Balance between freetime and work was perfect - basically whole time management was working very well till the end. Very important thing for me was that trainers was listening to our needs so we had enough time also for discussion when was needed.
➢ Balance between free time and work was very good. As for the input, I would have expected more content on communication techniques (e.g. how to be more persuasive, more convincing, how to make sure the message we want to share is clear...) and a deeper feedback from the trainers on our discussions (and not just feedback from the participants).
❖ What do you think about the methods that were used during the training?
➢ Loved the methodologies, lots of new ideas to bring home
➢ It was a good mix. Not all worked for me, but I am sure someone else found them useful.
➢ It was various methods, shows the differences of the trainers personalities.
➢ Effective challenging in style experiental especially the simulation exercise and resulting to cognitive processes and knowledge
❖ Please give a short feedback to the trainers (as a group or individual). What do you appreciate in our work and what can be still improved?
➢ I appreciate their complementarity. They were really different but really inspiring at the same time.
➢ They are energetic friendly smiling and problem solving all the time. They were also very well organized. Thank you !
➢ You had a very good "management" of the group and were quite complementary. A few instructions were a bit unclear sometimes but that didnt impacted the activities.
➢ I think for the group: everyone supported each other, like assist. Also it was nice to see that everyone took an interest in each others work.
➢ I think also that all trainers were open for questions and critiques.
➢ For improvement: sometime's it wasn't very easy to always understand everything so a recap would be handy. Some bits were a bit long and we didn't always had time to process the information or do more exercises.
❖ What can we do to improve the training?
➢ A little bit more theorotical framework would be good in addition to the exercises.
➢ More time on some of the methods. And maybe explain a bit more about some of the methods before the audience try them out.
➢ I think we said about it during reflection groups - sometimes it was not enough time to evaluate activity (like after the debate simulation), but also it was part if free evening so I'm aware that if we will be working then we will have enough time - maybe sometimes is better to sacrifice even the free time for go through evaluation so we can understand better what we have learned.
➢ To be more ready to share.
❖ Is there anything else you would like to share with us?
➢ Thank you all! Impressive week with high quality workshops, good amount of humour but always with interesting content. Keep it up, hope to be part of a follow up or other similar training in the future.
➢ The training was well built and well done!
➢ I've spent a useful time here with trainers and partissipants from whom I have learned a lot!
➢ I think that for training organized for the first time you did awesome job and you should be proud of yourselfes, so I hope you will continiue with this training. And all the best and traditionally hope to see you somewhere in Europe :)
➢ I think these trainings are important, esspecialy in these times. So i think this is important work, something that should be naturally in are schools.
I created with the other 3 trainers all the training and I delivered the session related to dissemination, competences, recognition, etc
It is the TPP of TOT and was great!