Circus pedagogy as a tool for youth work development

IMPORTANT: WE ARE ACCEPTING ONLY SLOVENIAN PARTICIPANTS. In a context where it is becoming increasingly hard to reach youngsters, we understand the importance of developing and delivering interesting and stimulating activities to better involve youth worker's target group aged between 13 and 30. We want to propose appealing activities to youngsters in the form of circus pedagogy workshops. Apart from being attractive to young people, these activities convey modern values of citizenship, honesty and cooperation and at the same time build personal self-esteem and trust. With that in mind, we want to provide youth workers with an innovative and flexible method of work and educate them to help reach their goals. We use circus activities as a form of pedagogy in teaching and in non-formal education. Our main idea is that circus activity is appealing and fun for everybody, making it ideal as a tool for educational work with youngsters. The aim is to introduce youth workers and youngsters to positive, healthy activities that encourages co-operation, and strengthen confidence, while developing co-ordination and persistence. The end result is much more than learning these skills – it also helps to improve self-esteem, build on a social capital and direct people towards positive ways of living. Our project will involve 24 participants from different countries all active in youth work. We want to involve many different countries as we would like to offer participants a chance to broaden their cultural horizon, make new contacts outside their countries and help them kick start their own international projects. We believe that these projects are a key to more efficient youth work, and therefore a key to improving youngsters’ lifestyle across the European Union. Helped by a staff of professional circus experts, we rely on this project to reach our main goal of teaching the participants the basics of various circus skills such as acrobalance, juggling, diabolo, balloon modelling etc. and various methods of preparing and implementing circus workshops, which they will be able to use as a tool in their work with youngsters. At the end of our training course all the participants will be equipped with knowledge on how to prepare and implement circus pedagogy workshop on their own. Working together the 24 participants and our staff of 4 will also interact with the local population ofering them a final public circus event consisting from a circus workshop and circus performance, to share a moment of happiness, of intercultural reciprocal exchange and, at the same time, send out a clear message about the potentialities of non-formal education to the young citizens of the hosting town.