TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Dominique Verschuren
The aim was to enable participants to support the young people they work with in their identity process and to plan their personal pathway in life. We did this by bringing the participants themselves on a journey of self-discovery. We invited participants who are open to experiencing this personal journey and who are in a position to apply their learning to their work with young people after this training course.
Objectives:
• To support participants to become more aware of themselves and in so doing be enabled to make conscious choices and decisions that fit with their goals in life.
• To provide participants with some tools to support their young people through a similar process.
• To look at how we as individuals can rely on our own resources.
• To understand the forces that shape us as individuals.
• To understand how our behaviour is influenced by our perception of ourselves, and by how others see us.
• To look how you can rely on powerless, inconvenient feelings and deal constructively with them.
• To discover the new Erasmus Plus program and its actions as a tool to support the objectives of this training
• To encourage participants to imagine that Everything is Possible!
Target group were youth workers who are involved in advising all kinds of youngsters. There were 30 participants from : Belgium, Italy, Poland, Croatia, Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Latvia, Romania.
This training course was based on non-formal and informal education with a self-directed learning approach. The training course was developed from the expectations and needs of the participants and the experience and knowledge from the trainers. The training course was characterized by highly participatory, interactive and experiential methods. The working methods included (personal) case studies from the participants, individual reflecting tasks, working in pairs and small groups, team building activities, discussions, experiencing exercises, reflection groups, workshops developed by the participant and self-assessment.
To many of the participants this training course made a huge impact. Most of them are still in the shaping years of their lifes. It seems that they easily incorporate what they have learned in their ‘system’, it can easily become a pattern in their daily life. That also influence their environment in the way they interact with that environment.
More concrete the trainers invited the participants to make a realistic, concrete action that they could achieve within a month after the end of the training course. An action to make new initiatives, to make a new start, to change a pattern which also can be felt by their environment : colleagues, friend, family, their organisation, manucipality, stakeholders, the young people they work with… Outcomes were: a new TC, a sport event, a blog, teaching children with desablities...
I was one of the two trainers, and organiser.