Day 9 - Follow-up and evaluation

Today is the last day. We are a little sad, but grateful for the opportunity. We had an amazing experience during these nine days, sharing ideas with wonderful people from all over Europe. We've learned so much, had so much fun. But now, it ends.

We spent the morning looking forward to the future, planning our follow ups back home. Then, we had a discussion, helping each other to improve.

Next, we took advantage of the multiculturalism in our group and found topics we were passionate about. In small, international groups, we made the first steps towards new projects on topics like gender equality, citizenship and culture. We were our own monitors, providing feedback at the end and support. Those of us who found more than one project they liked, could easily go about joining them. By now, we are all a big team.

One of the best moments of our training took place today. One of the participants, Parvi, shared her experience as a psychotherapist and held a gestalt therapy session with us. It was intense and demanding, a truly unique moment.

The afternoon brought with it reflection time. Half laughing, high on the feeling of the last hours, we analysed what we had learned; our project made us more European, more involved, more aware - everything we had wanted it to. It was a bitter-sweet moment.

Now, in the last hours, we are trying to finish up, say goodbye. We get our Youthpass, make invitations to see each other again and write a last page. It's cheesy, but true. We'll miss our time here. Little by little, we built the foundation of a much larger movement we will take with us. But here, our time together ends.

     

( Don't worry:  We'll finish happy, with a party)

Day 3 - And so it begins!

Another day started and with it, the excitement of finally starting the topic of the training!

After energizers, we went directly to finish discussion about the 8 key competences of Youth Pass and what it's about.

This showed that not only people are here to learn about "No Hate Speech" but also they are here to learn to how to learn :)

And finally, the Human Rights and No Hate Speech topic started!
As a way to approach people, everyone shared when or why they got interested in this topic and what brought them to Estonia.

This resulted in a very dynamic discussion about many concepts and their definitions.

 And it was amazing to see how passionate people were!

For the end of the day, we had the presentations of 4 countries that are participating:

Slovakia, Spain, Germany and Romania!

Food, drinks, fun facts and interesting facts! We believe everyone stayed with something about these countries on their memories!

Almost forgot to mention, through out the night, dancing was the main action in our group!

Amazing! :)

Day 2 - Building the foundation

After an exciting Intercultural evening day 2 started with some energizers. We revisited ROPES group agreement to ensure that we were on track with our commitment to each other.

The first task of the day was to design and create a diary to be used with our learning buddy in which we could record our own personal learning goals.

The second task of the day involved a team building challenge in which we were given 20 activities to complete in 30 minutes. To do this we needed to work together to ensure success. See the photographs below.

In the afternoon we looked at the different styles of learning. 

Formal learning – We all know formal education from school, university or even nursery. We go there to learn what the teacher is telling us to learn and we write exams at the end of a learning process to check if we are able to fulfill the learning requirement.

Non-formal learning – this is actually what we do here….. We set up our learning aims by ourselves and nobody forces us to learn something. Instead of having a teacher we have facilitators or trainers who motivate us in the learning process. It is learning by experience you make by yourself. Learning by doing or how the scouts would say ‘learning by burning’.

Informal learning – we all have informal learning results. It means we learn without planning it. Some examples are reading a book, watching TV or a movie, conversations or trips.

The day the followed by the session about Erasmus+ programmes, we had group discussions and then we evaluated our knowledge and understanding of this European funding through a quiz.

After that, we completed the day with discussion about 8 Key Competences, which are the fundamental part of the life-long learning of all European citizens and recognized by the awarding of the Youthpass.

This was just the second day of getting to know each other before looking deeply into the subject of Hate Speech. And as you can see from the week programme below, there are many fruitful sessions waiting for us during our training course J