The Fair, the Unfair and the Collective Intelligence

This training aims at developing youth work tools to respond to situations of injustice that young people may face in their environment or life. It will be based on the idea of "performances" to be realised in public in order to contest or fight against these situations of injustice through a creative process of active participation and expression. If you feel like being a bit irreverent and wish to express this in order, later on, to encourage your young target public to do it also, then, apply to participate to: "The Fair, the Unfair and the Collective Intelligence". Context: Raising the question of "active participation" or "collective attitude" of young people implies to reflect on the importance of a youth expression in public. The recent events show that the "public space moment", where collective action starts in order to express, to contest, to build a "collective intelligence" is extremely important towards a real social change, not limited to debate or arguments. Currently, one of the issues of non formal education, at local and global levels, is to enable citizens to link three different points: experience, learning linked with this experience and capacity to overcome power relations they suffer from: arbitrary power of firms, arbitrary power of employers, arbitrary power of public administration or state bodies, any kind of discrimination, violence of the relationships between men and women, denying of rights, destruction of environment, injustices as far as health, housing, education … is concerned. Hence, irreverence has a central dimension in a non formal creative education work with young people. But what means "irreverence"? This means all the creative modalities through which a group can “afford” to strongly question, even in a joyful way, social roles, love relationships, family relationships, professional relationships, the economic conflicts, media information, medical conditions… in order to analyse them, to find out if those different relationships are unfair or arbitrary, in order to imagine a different lifestyle, to find true happiness by using, for example, resources either from contemporary art styles or from different contemporary languages… Aim : To learn or reinforce a "participation pedagogy" Objectives: - discovering youth situations and experiences of collective injustice from the participants' background; - mutual discovery of practices of youth "collective performances" in the public arena - exploration and identification of different conceptions of the notion of "public arena" in the 21st century (what is it? where is it? how open is it?...) - development of tools in order to create youth "collective performances" to be realised in the public arena (with political messages). Tools which can be used or adapted in the working context of the participants; - development, through a creative process, of performances to be implemented in Brussels public arena; - launching ideas of future international projects and networking Methodology : The working tools and methods will be based on non formal education principles: exercises, games and group dynamics, in plenary or sub-groups, in which the participants are invited to "produce" the content of the training rather than to "swallow" information. Linguistic cooperation and solidarity between French and English will be a key challenge during the activity.