For-Ex

Aims & objectives

“For-Ex”, which is abbreviation of For Exchanges, is Erasmus+ KA1 Mobility of Youth Workers, the training course to bring together the youth workers and youth leaders from the Program and Partner countries to develop their competences on working on intercultural learning process, referring and creating tools to promote mutual understandings, cultural diversity, European citizenship and active participation of the young people in the youth exchanges. The participants of the training course should have been in youth exchanges as a youth leader before.
Here are the objectives:
- Reflect on participants' own cultural identity,
- Mirror the participants how the others see them,
- Address the necessity of cultural sensitivity and mutual understanding,
- Experience intercultural conflict management: discrimination and xenophobia,
- Identify and analyse common elements of intercultural competence,
- Improve the quality of the youth exchanges by drawing attention to useful tools,
- Equip participants with new skills on generating tools for intercultural learning,
- Measure the impact of the tools,
- Follow up with new youth exchanges.

Target group & international/intercultural composition of the group & team

There were 33 youth leaders from Macedonia, Georgia, Slovenia, Italy, Bulgaria, Armenia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Russian Federation, Lithuania, Poland, Austria and Turkey.

Training methods used & main activities

In the training course, I referred the following methods: name games, team building games, fears, expectations and contributions, self-reflection on their own identity, lecture about perceptions & misconceptions and perception & identity, brainstorming on "What I see? What I think? What I feel?", fun quiz about culture, role play and discussion about stereotypes, group works about cultural diversity, case study: "Conflict Cases Based on Cultural Diversity & Management", group works about Intercultural Competence and Cross-Cultural Sensitivity (M. J. Bennet's Stages, discussions on Quality on Cultural Diversity Projects, lecture on "Introduction of the Tools for Cultural Diversity", lecture and group work about basics of PCM, Simulation on project designing, and oral and written evaluation.

Outcomes of the activity

There are two main outcomes of the project:
1. Participants designed youth exchange projects on cultural diversity.
2. Participants generated tools about cultural diversity and intercultural competence. These tools are online at SALTO Tool Box for Trainings. Here is the link: https://www.salto-youth.net/tools/toolbox/dashboard/edit/1612/
Also one participant from Azerbaijan later became the EVS volunteer of the organisation in Sinop, Turkey.

Your tasks and responsibilities within the team

I was the trainer and the facilitator in the team. I shared the sessions with my co-trainer from Austria.

I worked on this training for 5 days as a full time trainer.