TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Virginia Hernández
The activity was designed with the follow objectives:
- To offer to the youth workers who work, or would like to work, with deaf youngsters, to the
sign language interpreters and young deaf and hearing leaders, the needed tools to generate
and implement projects and cultural activities at local, regional, national and international
level accessible for deaf youngsters.
- To develop strategies to implement leisure and cultural activities and projects for deaf
youngsters at local, regional, national and international level to promote their participation.
- To share and develop actions to make the culture and artistic expressions accessible as a way
to develop the own cultural identity of the deaf community through theatre, dance, music and
poetry. To increase the social entrepreneurship in the deaf community in this frame.
The needs to be addressed during the activity were:
- To include the hearing participants, as a minority in the group, and involve them in each session.
- To rise awareness on the possibilties of using sign language in arts, poetry was the most interesting of them to the participants, mostly for the deaf ones.
One of the biggest challenge was to find the way to promote and motivate the organizations and the participants to work with deaf young people in sign language use for cultural activities. Each partner organization developed, after their participation in this activity, different actions, projects and/or activities related with sign language and deaf young people inclusion on their activities.
For this activity ther were 8 partner organizations as follow:
Spain: Matadero Lab. Turkey: Turkey Youth Union Association. Latvia: SAY!. Croatia: Association of the deaf and hard of hearing of the city
of Zagreb. Italy: AEEOS Onlus. Poland: School-Educational Center for the Deaf. Bulgaria: Assist Net EOOD. Romania: Tineret Buzau 2007.
The total number of participants were 12 deaf participants, 4 hearing and 7 sign language interpreters.
We used a participative methofology were participants had to be very active. Having a mayority of deaf participants demanded a different approach, so there were needed many visual incomes and games.
For the intercultural learning they worked in national groups and presented in a clover shape for of the most important cultural references and social inclusion for the deaf in each country. After the presentation they met in plenary to discuss the differences and similarities they found.
An activity about poetry in sign language was propoused, the participants could work individually or in groups, choosing between translate a written poem or create one by their own into sing language. The result of this activity was really beatiful. After a working time the participants presented their creations and after that they discussed in plenary how sorprised they were about their own creations and gave feedback to the others.
For daily evaluation a visual method was used, with a light-signal (green, yellow, red), writing in the green circle was they liked the most, in yellow with would be improved and red what they didn't like.
Throught this activity the participants were empowered to create, promote and motivate others to learn and use sign language as a tool for inclusion of deaf youngsters in their local communities. The Polish participants worked with their studients in a music clip with a national singer interpreting a song; the Italians created a sign language theatre club with hearing and deaf youngsters; the Turkish created an informal group to create videos in sign language with poetry and music and also started to write their own projects to promote deaf culture at European level, etc.
The regional TV promoted the project (minute 13:00): http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/noticias-de-castilla-la-mancha/clm-20170707135700ok/4102645/?fbclid=IwAR1FLdbTuvQDsTvuOe3XZ70FUR0nqiDl7CMdDlDd6CybzkhEmgP7f8LCIXE
Also the national TV (minute 7:25): http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/en-lengua-de-signos/lengua-signos-09-07-17/4105618/?fbclid=IwAR3xjDd7DEa8luwTo9tGX9k927lzC_peyPORLVwNYsmohbXxM0o5lU6J9mQ
The regional youth departament published they support on FB after the NA visit: https://www.facebook.com/pepe.moreno.988/posts/10209592899565607
I was the coordinator of the activity and also one of the trainers (we were two, one from Tureky, Elif, and me). We worked together during the previous weeks with skype meetings, phone and emails, we prepared together all the program, addapted it to the participants profile. In the beginning we didn't expect so many deaf participants, so we had to be flexible and understand the needs of the group were different than having hearing participants.
We runned together almost all the activities, Elif was more active running the ones around general deaf culture and I was in charge of all the artisitic activities such poetry or theatre.
The training was a wonderful experience of working with a mixed group of Deaf and hearing participants, 6 professional sign language interpreters, our fantastic guest Deaf trainers being expert on poetry and theatre and an absolute joy to work with Virginia.