TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Anna Huminiak
The main aim of this seminar was to create opportunities for participants to develop competences to engage into meaningful partnerships for international youth projects. Sub-goal of this activity was to explore and experience gamification as a way to improve engagement.
Specific objectives:
For participants this seminar offered opportunities to:
- Explore the meaning of good partnership through reflection and peer sharing;
- Learn how partnership works by practicing and developing competences for cooperation;
- Try and learn the tools that are useful to build, maintain and evaluate international partnerships;
- Explore and experience gamification by understanding this concept and its potential for youth work;
- Get informed about Erasmus+ opportunities and exchanges ideas for future partnerships.
The seminar was addressed to people working daily and directly with youth in governmental and non governmental organizations.
Participants were expected to have at least intermediate knowledge about Erasmus+: Youth Programme and have experience in leading at least two projects in frame of Action 1. (youth exchange, EVS, training and networking).
17 participants from 7 European countries took part in this activity (Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Spain, Ucraine).
The participants’ experience of organising projects varied. Some of them had only basic experience of participating in the international youth projects; others had extensive experience of organising projects.
The participants represented diverse organisations and this enriched the sharing of practices and perspectives.
The trainers team was composed of two trainers from Poland (Anna Huminiak, Krzysztof Wiatr) and one from Lithuania (Nerijus Kriauciunas).
Various group dynamic activities were used to facilitate the getting to know process and establish grounds for future cooperation.
The partnership was a transversal topic for the seminar and was explored step by step using variety of the methods:
- reflecting groups, sharing their partnership experiences in previous projects;
- use of artistic expressions and debating (to express personal perceptions and understandings of the partnership topic);
- a cooperation game and debriefing (to collect attributes of good partnership and discuss them);
- the interactive input of how trust, cooperation and reputations is built in the massive multiplayer games online and on the collaborative economy platforms.
The concept of gamification was introduced through the experiential way and practical inputs. The participants were involved in the Actionbound (http://www.actionbound.com) activity in Warsaw.
Erasmus+: Youth in Action opportunities were introduced through the format of the TV show “Who wants to become a Millionaire?”. This was an interactive way to introduce basic information and rules of Erasmus+.
The partnership building was supported through offering space and time to discover participants’
and organisations’ backgrounds, share practices and ideas for future cooperation.
Majority of participants agreed that the objectives of the seminar were met close to the maximum extent. The outcome of the seminar were partnership activities, planned within participants and implemented projects of international cooperation. Informal networks of youth workers interested in the topics of youth partnership and gamification.
Training delivery, developing training content and methodology, co-author of the final report.