TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Morgaine Green
Main Aim:
To develop tools and methods within the youth work framework to actively promote the participation of young people with intellectual disabilities in mobility activities and the interaction of heterogeneous groups of people with different abilities. Furthermore we wish to potentiate the cohesion and the cooperation among European organizations active in the field of disability and to generate new actions and projects within this frame.
Training Objectives:
to share the current situation of the involved countries concerning the way in which disability is approached, analysing the reasons behind the lack of participation of youngsters with disability in local and international projects;
to reflect on the causes and the consequences of exclusion and discriminative events toward people with disability;
to share and enhance the idea of “different abilities”, promoting diversity in inclusion;
to share good practices and pilot experiences to promote anti-racist approaches and actions in the involved countries;
to share the existing methods youth workers and organizations are using to promote active participation of youngsters with intellectual disability and impairment;
to develop tools and methods to meet the needs of young people with “different abilities”, to enhance the interaction and the participation among heterogeneous groups of young people.
Representatives of the partner organizations, youth workers and active volunteers, interested in the project topic, from Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Czech Republic, Austria and France.
The whole project was based on participative and interactive methodologies within the non formal education – NFE framework, promoting:
flexibility, being learner-centred, contextualized and based on the promotion of participatory approaches;
horizontal cooperation, where facilitators and experts create a shared learning path with participants and trainees, encouraging the exchange of knowledge;
personal empowerment though self-esteem raising, development of the self-confidence, competences and skills development.
It was proposed as a learning by doing approach, where in each activity, the specific objectives will allow to better target the action and to ensure a coherent learning process.
Furthermore there was the possibility to re-adapt the methods during the process, taking into account the needs of participants and of the different actors involved. This decision was due to the need of giving flexibility to the learning experience, encouraging the different learning approaches and the activation of the individual skills.
In addition to this there was a special and specific focus on body awareness through methods of dance and body percussion as universal languages between a not only intercultural but interabilities group.
Throughout the training we held reflection groups for consistent flexibility and adapatation of the content, methods and atmosphere, which showed the success of the facilitation of the group dynamic and of the specific body awareness contents and methods, through the opinions of the participants.
Other results were the activities of "Training in Action" prepared by small groups of participants for the rest of the group to put into action what they'd learnt, so as to be able to use it in the upcoming Youth Exchanges as part of the same project.
The Group Leaders are participants of this training course and will apply the learning outcomes in a mobility action of young people of the same countries involved in the training.
We were a team of 4 full-time trainers, with different areas of expertise but one shared vision, contributing and learning at the same time from each other.
In particular my expertise relevant to this training is heterogeneous groups of young people with and without disability, inclusive methodologies and body percussion.