TOY - Trainers Online for Youth
This is a reference for Vitalie Cirhana
The main aim of this training is to explore how games could be turned into a crucial learning experience that give the opportunity for children and youth to learn many useful things and promotes inclusion. Youth workers need better skills to turn playing experience into the learning experience and this training. This will provide them with chance to exchange experience with other colleagues, find out good practices as well as develop their own competences on how to use games more effectively.
The objectives go well together with several priorities of YiA and EPYW:
- It creates better understanding on the nature of good quality youth work and thus provides better quality support system for young people.
- By turning games into a learning experience, the youth workers are making children and youngsters to be more aware and active citizens.
- There are many games through which it is much easier to understand the value of inclusion, so, in this training we will pay special emphasis on touching this topic of how to use games to promote inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities.
- As almost all the partner organizations work in smaller towns and rural areas, this will be also a great chance for inclusion of youth with fewer opportunities from rural areas.
- By develpoing projects for youn people (mainly from rural areas) that will be implemented in the future, in a long term also the understanding between young peoples from different countries in the future will be promoted.
Project includes participants from 4 programme countries (Romania, Slovenia, Latvia and Estonia) and 3 countries from EaP (Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine).
he training was designed to tackle the needs of the participants and their organizations to increase their competencies in using games as a tool for facilitation non-formal learning.
Considering the different learning styles of people, we make sure that the methods chosen provide a good balance of opportunities for different people and are as interactive/involving as possible. We make participants to be aware that gamea can take place both in in formal as well as non-formal settings.
An important part was also sharing of experiences and learning from each other. Untraditionally, the participants have posibility to be both participants as well as facilitators of the games as learning process .
Based on experiential learning principles, emphasis will put on reflection and evaluations to ensure that participants have increased their competencies and will later be able to apply the experiences gained during the project and share them with wider communities in their home countries.
The impact of this training is two-fold. The immediate impact was on directly involved participants, but as these are the people working with youth, in a longer perspective their skills, knowledge and inner readiness to change things will be affecting also young people that they work with and communities.
From the contents of the project we expect following outcomes:
- Better realization what are the needs and interests of youth living outside capitals in different countries – and how does it differ between European and EECA countries.
- Exchanged experience between different youth workers on how they work with youth and children and what activities they provide
- Meeting and contacts with youth workers from different youth centers in Georgia (and possible cooperation in future)
- Raised awareness on what are the principles, values and characteristics of non-formal learning (NFL) and ideas on how to change leisure time organization into NFL
- More knowledge and skills on using NFL methodology and experiential learning
- Discovery and realization how GAMES that are usually used for entertainment could be used as a valuable tool for learning and training
- Gained information about the new programme (successor of YiA) – what are the opportunities and how it works
- Partnership-building and project idea development between participants.
To work on teambuilding and create an environment where the trainers and participants are in the best possible mindset to learn from the trainers and other participants, to create a framework where participants will learn and share about their particular knowledge and experience, and be creative and innovative in developing solutions to the issues presented during the project. To explore together with participants topics of games as learning tools, facilitation of learning activities.