“Switch it on – Inclusion for Teachers”

Aims & objectives

The general idea of this training course was to bring together teachers from different European countries in order in to share realities on what is the situation regarding exclusion of various groups of young people in the local community and school, explore mechanisms of discrimination and exclusion as well as develop common understanding and skills on how inclusion of young people with special needs and fewer opportunities could be promoted through non-formal education.

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

The target group of the activity were 24 teachers and education specialists from Latvia, Romania, Greece, Sweden, Italy, Estonia, Turkey and Poland – 3 persons from each country. The profile of teachers for this training course was as listed:
- Teachers who worked at school and have been teaching in the school for at least 2 years (it does not matter what subject...) and preferably do also some extra-curricula activities with youth;
- Teachers who were teaching students not younger than 13;
- Teachers, who had the support of their schools to participate in the training and bring back new ideas and skills regarding inclusion;

Training methods used & main activities

All activities were based on non-formal learning methods, meaning – they were based on the participants and organizations needs. Most of the methods used during the TC required high involvement of participants (discovery of local realities, group work, discussions, role-plays, Forum theatre, local reality presentations and sharing of good practice and experiences, development of educational tools and implementation of initiated activities, etc.). To increase the feeling of involvement, responsibility and ownership, bottom-up approach were used as much as possible and the diversity of group was used as a resource. We created the environment where every person felt the ownership of the training by applying various techniques of co-creation of different parts of programme.

Outcomes of the activity

The training first of all contributed to personal and professional development of the participants: changed attitudes and developed skills to become more inclusive and provide more safe and supportive learning and socializing environment for young people; developed skills on how to design and facilitate various NFL activities resulting in 8 new activities developed during the training;exchanged practices and experiences; created new partnerships;

Your tasks and responsibilities within the team

All the tasks and responsibilities were shared between the 3 trainers of the training. All the following activities were co-facilitated during the whole process:
* getting to know each other,
* team building activities,
* activities during the evening sessions,
* Experiential learning,
* different understandings of education / learning,
* moving debate about Teacher vs. Trainer,
* characteristics of NFE,
* facilitating the creativity task and development of new learning tools;
* couching the participants during the process of designing and implementing non-formal activities, offering feed-back,
* wold cafe and open space methods,
*evaluation and further steps,

I worked on this training for 8 days as a full time trainer.