TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Antoniya Lyubenova
Nonviolent Communication is a tool that guides practitioners in reframing how they express themselves, how to hear others
and resolve conflicts by focusing on what they are observing, feeling, needing, and requesting. It is a tool that leads us
toward compassionate connection between people in which everyone's needs are valued and are met through collaboration.
Through Nonviolent Communication, conflict resolution becomes easier, avoiding simple disputes and resolving difficult
ones more effectively. Nonviolent Communication is highly connected with Emotional Intelligence because it relies on people
understanding their own emotions and motivations as well as understanding and empathising with the needs of others.
Learning to resolve conflicts with peers is an important skill for European youth to learn. At Alter Network, we have found
that role play, puppets, and improv theatre are great for helping young people practice problem solving and learn key
phrases that can help them address challenges. Using puppets to model desirable behaviours gives youth workers an
example to work from in real life. “Becoming” the mediator allows them to communicate better with working with young
people from troubled backgrounds.
Key objectives of the project:
- deliver a training course on the topic of non-violent communication through puppetry to 25 youth workers
- equip our participants with a new tool that they may use to better tackle challenges that they face working with
marginalised groups or youth coming from troubled homes
- contribute to social inclusion growth and to promote dialogue through new means of communication and art
- teach our participants the necessary skills to put on and puppet show educating their community on the method of
nonviolent communication during the local phase
Youth workers aged 20-50 years old, from Bulgaria, Turkey, Portugal, Italy, Czech Republic, Latvia and Greece
Our main educational approach is Experiential learning and Learning by doing. The different processes are designed in a
way that the participants are first experiencing themselves the methods that they will be trained to use. After that, they have
moments for reflection, followed by a conclusion and applying the new knowledge to the context they (the participants)
already work in. This is applicable for every workshop and also in general for the project, since the Local Phase is there to
give space to the participants to bring in their local communities their new knowledge and methods. We have a three-layer
system of reflection (individual, in small groups and in the big group), so that we ensure that what the body experiences, the
mind processes and put into practice. During the project, we provide individual coaching, so that each participant receive
support in their learning. To ensure that we provide high-quality education, our team had several online meetings where we
have discussed the methods that we use and we have decided on who are the experts in the field that can facilitate this
learning. We create experiences that bring behavioural change, training with a focus on the difficulties that the youth
workers face during their working process. We do not train them to use the methods mentioned above in general, but to
bring them and adapt them to their specific environments. When designing this training course we have started with an
analysis of the needs so that it can be concrete and meet the concrete learning needs of the participants.
2. Various work forms.
During the project we use various work forms:
- Reflection circles
- Learning by doing workshops, where the participants are actively engaged in experiencing the methods that we train
- Intercultural learning events (informal learning set-up, where we create the context)
- Brainstorming sessions
- Simulations
- Individual and group feedback sessions
3. Methods trained and applied in the training
- Puppet-making. We work primarily with hand puppets as they speak directly from the soul. Puppets on a sting are difficult
to co‐ordinate and require complex cognitive‐motor processes. The more complex the thought processes, the more feelings
are lost. A central assumption is that people always choose puppets, which have a significant meaning to them personally
The puppets reflect parts of their own character.
- Simulations. When we get people to experience a certain quality of connection to the pain that’s been inside a long time, it
can be rapidly transformed. Simulations in pair or in groups can be quite beneficial to understanding one's own and other
people's emotions. Because our training is based on the assumption that all violent language is a tragic expression of unmet
needs, zoning out of our own emotions can help us see the situation from the side and assess it more clearly.
- Theatre of the oppressed through puppets - The Theatre of the Oppressed describes theatrical forms that the Brazilian
theatre practitioner Augusto Boal first elaborated in the 1970s, initially in Brazil and later in Europe. Boal was influenced by
the work of the educator and theorist Paulo Freire and his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Boal's techniques use theatre
as means of promoting social and political change in alignment originally with radical-left politics and later with centre-left
ideology. In the Theatre of the Oppressed, the audience becomes active, such that as "spect-actors" they explore, show,
analyse and transform the reality in which they are living.
- Forum theatre through puppets - In this process, the actors or audience members could stop a performance, often a short
scene in which a character was being oppressed in some way. In early forms of "simultaneous dramaturgy", the audience
could propose any solution, by calling out suggestions to the actors who would improvise the changes on stage. If and when
the oppression has been overthrown by the spect-actors, the production changes again: the spect-actors now have the
opportunity to replace the oppressors, and find new ways of challenging the oppressed character. In this way a more
realistic depiction of the oppression can be made by the audience, who are often victims of the oppression. The whole
process is designed to be dialectic, coming to a conclusion through the consideration of opposing arguments, rather than
didactic, in which the moral argument is one-sided and pushed from the actors with no chance of reply or counter-argument.
- Newspaper theatre - A system of techniques devised to give the audience a way to transform daily news articles or any
non-dramatic pieces to theatrical scene.
- Analytical theatre - A story is told by one of the participants and immediately the actors improvise it. Afterward each character is broken down into their social roles and the participants are asked to choose a physical object to symbolize each role.
Nonviolent communication through puppet theatre benefitted the participants and their communities back home in a way that they:
- speak in a way that inspires compassion and understanding
- initiate difficult conversations with more ease and confidence
- remain centered and peaceful while hearing difficult messages
- finding the gift underneath anger so that instead of blasting someone with blame, you transform anger into life-serving
energy
- shift patterns of thinking that lead to depression, guilt, shame
- enliven themselves by expressing and receiving gratitude
- translate criticism, judgments and blame into life-serving messages
- resolve long-standing conflicts and heal painful relationships
- inspire others to change their behavior willingly
Project writer/Project Manager/Trainer