Once we have finished with the comedy segment of our training course “Comedy as a Tool – Enhancing Youth Engagement through Humor”, it was time to dive deeper into the next part of the project, focusing on youth engagement and improvement of our facilitation skills of non-formal learning activities.
As always, we started the morning session with a fun and dynamic energizer involving a lot of movement to wake us up and prepare us for the upcoming work. When everyone was energized, we got back into the plenary to discuss about non-formal education and its main characteristics and features. Once everyone shared their understandings and experiences with NFE, we got introduced that our main task for today will be to plan, design and test new and innovative non-formal learning tools (activities/methods/approaches) that we can summarize into Toolbox and use in our youth work. The tools were supposed to be connected to the topics of the project, such as youth participation, intercultural learning, social issues and improvement of key competencies.
The trainers introduced us to the process of creating a non-formal tool, divided us into teams of 3, helped us to brainstorm ideas for specific topics we want to focus on and provided us with a template that can guide us in the process. We needed to figure out what will be the activity about, who will be the target group/s, what will be the objectives and learning outcomes, how long it will take to run it, what materials we will need, explain specific instructions for delivering it and provide any additional information that might be needed.
We quickly jumped into this challenge that helped us to utilize the knowledge, skills and experience we gained during the training course so far. The trainers monitored our group work, provided us with guidance and showed us resources that we can use in creating our own non-formal learning activities. We had time to finish our activities until the start of the afternoon sessions because that’s when we will start to test them in front of everyone, without knowing who will start first. The time pressure and challenge pushed everyone to give their best and really focus on the given task. Can’t wait to see what everyone has think of!
