Open Call for Training Course on outdoor education for youth workers “LABIRINT” (Activity #1)

Erasmus+ Training Course
17-24 April 2019 | Sondershausen, Germany

With the “LABIRINT Training Course on outdoor education for youth workers” we would like to let youth workers actively working with young people discover outdoor education and adventure-based learning and develop their competencies to apply them in their practices, especially in relation to empowering young people with fewer opportunities at local level. The main aim of this long term training course is to train youth workers on how to use outdoor education for addressing current challenges of nowadays and building so called soft competences and skills, such as respect, efficient ommunication, tolerance, non-judgment approach, ability to work in teams and critical thinking.

As a general outcome, we expect our participants to improve their competencies in outdoor and general education, as well as other competencies related to their professional profile and by applying outdoor education while working with diverse target groups of young people. These results will become the basis for the following activities and can become a great stimulus for the further development and work of the partner organizations and the participants. The methods will be informal and highly participatory.

Objectives of the project:

• Discover outdoor and experiential learning, their historical perspective, principles and models
• Articulate and reflect on participants’ own values base for outdoor and experiential learning
• Experience various outdoor methods and techniques and reflect on ways of incorporating these methods and techniques into their daily youth work with young people including young people with
  fewer opportunities, young people from marginalized background, radicalized youth or with refugees
• Share practices, experiences, methods and techniques of outdoor education across and increasing the quality of youth work in participants’ countries
• Develop participants’ reflexive skills and critical, innovative, creative thinking and challenging outdoor learning contexts and their application
• Develop participants’ competences in designing, planning, implementing and evaluating outdoor and experiential learning activities
• Understand and handle risk and safety in outdoor settings
• Increase knowledge of the participants on Erasmus+, support creating new project ideas based on using outdoor methods and techniques and promote networking and cooperation.

This training course consists of three parts:
1. The 1st activity is a training course which will allow the participants to learn about outdoor by trying out different forms of outdoor learning and acquire the set of competences needed for a youth worker when working with outdoor activities. It will take part in Sondershausen, Germany from 17 to 24 April 2019.

2. The first activity will be followed by the local phase, which is the 2nd part, where participants will practice gained skill in local realities.

3. The 3rd activity is a seminar which will focus on the ways of balanced incorporation of outdoor education into work with young people with fewer opportunities. It is planned take part on Baikal lake, Russia from 20 to 28 July 2019.

Activity #1 specifics:

This activity “OutDoor inAction” is a training course where the participants will discover what outdoor is, try out different methods and tools and acquire a set of competences needed for a youth worker when working with outdoor activities.

Objectives:
– To introduce principles of experiential learning and outdoor education
– To introduce the concept of youth empowerment and to experience empowerment tools in outdoor education
– To understand the importance of youth participation and how outdoor education methods can contribute to more interactive education process inside youth centers, schools/ universities
– To practice and to test different outdoor methods, tools and techniques
– To take the responsibility for fostering youth
– To build competences in designing, implementing and evaluation of outdoor
education activity
– To understand principles of group learning through facilitation and debriefing of outdoor activities
– To understand the value of personal development through feedback
– To identify the limits of educator in the education process in outdoor education
– To understand how to give responsibility for the learning process and educational flow to learners during outdoor activities.

If you are interested to join the project please let us know by contacting us, so we can share additional info on projects logistics with you.