New Global Learning - Youth Workers as Global Learning Facilitators (NGL)
project
Mar 01, 2022 - Mar 01, 2024
Polska Debatuje
Young people are taking on today’s most pressing issues - they are advocating for a greener, sustainable future, women’s, LGBTQ, and minority rights, an end to discrimination, and wealth inequality. Some question or even oppose those movements. Unfortunately, they have more access to fake news and echo chambers perpetuating specific points of view than they do to education that tackles the local and global issues that are relevant now.
Formal education available to the youth, especially in lower-income EU countries or countries where populist policies have a strong influence on education, often does not cover present-day or “controversial” issues. Non-formal education can fill that gap and provide for exciting global learning opportunities in areas where there are currently no such options. However, these issues are transdisciplinary, complex, and difficult for youth workers to tackle and support young people
in navigating them without proper support.
This project was created as a direct response to youth workers' needs. Supporting learning and informed discussion on a wide range of topics such as artificial intelligence, gender norms, different approaches to the climate crisis, or the friction between some cultural practices and European values is proving to be difficult, especially considering the fact that youth workers themselves are coming from highly specialized formal educational backgrounds where a narrow scope of topics was covered. What youth workers need is a set of methods, case studies, and exercises they can use to analyze those topics when working with young people.
All of these topics fall under the umbrella of global learning, an established educational concept denoting teaching and learning processes that aim to increase global awareness, tolerance and responsibility, sustainable development and green transformation, support young people in approaching the world's challenges and opportunities from multiple perspectives, and wrestling with the ethical implications of differential power and privilege across the globe. It has the potential to create a firm foundation for responsible and active citizenship.
While general global learning guidelines for educators exist, this project sets out to build on those foundations through innovative and digital methods, as well as by providing youth organizations with replicable training modules for youth workers and trainers.
This project supports the production of:
Training modules for youth workers and trainers
Our project asks youth workers to approach their work from a global and transdisciplinary perspective in order to successfully address complex issues. This project result is intended to serve as:
- a self-learning guide for youth workers and other educators
- a guide for training youth workers trainers
- a guide for organizations to carry out youth worker training
The modules will function as a tool for continuous skill development, bridging the gap between the different specialized educational backgrounds youth workers come from and the transdisciplinary needs of the young people they work with.
A youth worker toolkit on approaching contemporary issues
This result is intended as a toolkit for youth workers containing sample case analyses of contemporary issues young people are interested in, including climate change, poverty, immigration, and access to reliable news and other information. The toolkit will feature thinking models and strategies for critical analysis of contemporary issues built on debate methodology and specifically different models of motion analysis, case studies as implementation samples, worksheets and exercises, and pedagogical tips for youth workers.
A digital learning environment
This output will round up all of our efforts in integrating the approaches of global education and debate methodology, allowing us to showcase open comprehensive materials and provide our target groups with individualized e-learning lessons in related content.
The project is co-funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ programme.
