Alljärgnevalt toome Euroopa Nõukogu Haridus- ja koolitusüksuse juhataja Rui Gomes’i mõtted meetodite rakendamisest tänapäeva rahvusvahelises noorsootöös. Tegu on 2006. aasta novembris Pariisis aset leidnud rahvusvahelisel seminaril „Tool Fair” peetud ettekandega.

„Meetod” on viimastel aastatel kujunenud võlusõnaks, mis näikse võimaldavat muuta õppimist, õpetamist ja (mis seal salata) õpetajat õppijatele atraktiivseks, efektiivseks, kättesaadavaks. Üks õige koolitaja, noorsootöötaja jne peab omama varasalves korralikku kogumit „mängudest”, millega erinevaid teemasid käsitleda, õppimise õhkkonda mõnusamaks muuta, õppijate vahelist tutvumist soodustada jne. Meetod peaks ent olema eelkõige vahend, mitte eesmärk omaette, ning selle ületähtsustamisel on teatud ohud.

 

Oma ettekandes pöörab hr Gomes tähelepanu mitmetele meetodipõhiseks kujunemise ohus oleva rahvusvahelise noorsootöö probleemidele ja küsitavustele. Ta viitab väärtustele, mille nimel ja toel me seda tööd teeme, ja küsib, kuivõrd aitab meie praegune praktika nende väärtuste arendamisele kaasa. Küsimusi küsib ta enamgi – lugege ja mõelge kaasa!

 

Educational Tools in Youth Work: Opening or closing Pandora's tool box?

Lecture at the "Tool Fair", Injep, 2 November 2006

I have been asked to speak about the role of educational tools in international youth work, and to address more specifically, the limits, interests and issues that should all of us involved in educational activities in youth work.

This invitation has originally been addressed to my colleague and director, Peter Lauritzen. Before he had to cancel his lecture, he addressed Clément about the many reservations he had about this kind of event and, more generally, about the widespread use of educational tools in education and training activities, which he metaphorically summarised as "the mushrooming" of tool-based pedagogies. The risk, as he sees it, would be that the tools for assistance of the learning process would be at the centre of the activity and concern of the learners and facilitators - not necessarily the issue or the purpose. I am not Peter Lauritzen. But I share many of his concerns, even if I probably am also part of those who have contributed to make the problem as he sees it. Polemics and personal preferences aside, I believe that these issues need to be regularly raised and debate, even if they are not new and even if we do not have immediate answers to them. It is our own way of putting ourselves into question and to address our frustrations in a hopefully constructive way.

In this presentation I would like to address the following issues:

• The role of educational tools

• The values and purpose of international youth activities, namely in relation to human rights and intercultural learning

• The dilemmas encountered in developing and using educational tools

• A review of the context for innovation and quality development

The role of educational tools

When we speak about educational tools, we mostly speak about structured processes that allow participants and trainers to fully make use of their creativity and potential for learning purposes. While it is obvious that the tool is not the objective, confusion quickly arises due mostly to the emphasis that many non-formal education activities place on the process. If the process is of major importance it is no surprise that the "tool" that is at the basis of the process is sometimes taken for the purpose. This is not so problematic as such, but our area of education and youth work has a history and a reality that invites for a sceptical evaluation in regards to its true value for learning purposes.

How much youth work is mostly about keep children and young people busy - sometimes simply "occupied"? The very ambiguity of the profession of "animateur" in its corresponding counterpart in other languages is sufficient indication that youth work has been also about keeping children and young people busy. Matters are not helped by the fact that many of us have a tendency to speak about the role games we play, the simulation games, the ice-breaking games. Not all of them are games, obviosuly! Obviously, too, language is not everything, but it certainly plays an important role in representing what we do and, obviously, how it is understood by others, including our participants and partners in other education fields.

The first book I met about "tools" for training was called "Handbook of structured learning experiences" and, in my understanding, the title summarises pretty well what we should be describing as educational tools of the trade: a support/assistance to learners and trainers involved structured learning processes, usually in non-formal education. That handbook was produced in the 1960's and in fact contained most of what we use today, albeit in different form, regarding personal development and team development. "Structured learning" is still a main term and area of educational practice in life-long learning. Obviously, if we look at what we intend to do, we should mostly be doing structured learning as part of what non-formal education is all about.

What was interesting with that manual is that one could use it for nearly everything: it was indeed a tool and, if you tried to use it without a purpose and without being adequately prepared, you would not be very successful.

In European youth work, educational tools were first practiced -and later developed - in the framework of the European Youth Centre's training courses in international youth work some 200 years ago. The first "Training course resource files" were compiled in 1990 and 1991 and were meant as a support to the trainers involved in those courses. They became immediately popular because they provided a useful medium for intercultural learning and training. Volume 4 as the most appreciated; there you could find such classics as Albatross or Abigail. We also published and used Baffa-baffa, Raffa-raffa, and other such exercises. In the training courses at that time, very often those activities would represent a culminating moment - a kind of paroxysm in the group development process, usually and mostly related to intercultural learning.

As we entered the 1995 "all different-all equal" European youth campaign on RAXI, a major change occurred with the production of the Education Pack "all different-all equal", whose purpose was clearly to help address the issues of the campaign in youth work activities within and beyond the campaign. The success of the Education Pack - combined with the qualitative and quantitative development of European youth activities, including youth exchanges and seminars - was very much at the origin of growth of the market for educational tools, even though the need was there already. With the Education Pack, later on with the T-Kits, and further on with Compass, the development of tools is focussed on a specific theme and implicitly acknowledges that these activities, exercises, methods or, indeed, games, can be run by anyone who is motivate to do so. With Compass, one further step is taken or suggested: the range of thematic issues is much broader and there is an explicit intention that you do not have to be a professional trainer in HRE to use Compass - and that you can start wherever you want.

Manuals such as Compass and the Education Pack have now been translated into some 20 languages and are used in a multitude of contexts and situations, not only in the youth field.

However, less visible and talked about is something that we had already learned with the Education Pack and saw confirmed with Compass. That despite them being "accessible", their full potential is only available to the facilitators and trainers who understand it and its approaches. In the training programme for Compass trainers we also saw confirmed what many of us knew: that trainers tend to use what they have experienced themselves and this for obvious reasons of... experiential learning. But it does leave us wondering about what happens when people use methods for which they have not been trained. In the Advanced Compass Training, for example, we expect the participants-trainers to develop new activities or variations.

This proliferation, together with a natural attitude to see learning also as fun, is no stranger to the concerns that are expressed more or less openly about the predominance of the process over the purpose or the result. Let's admit it, it is sometimes exasperating listening to participants complaining about how "heavy" a session is if it does not include an interactive or physical activity. It is even more exasperating to notice that criticism is less pronounced if a "game" does not fully produce the intended result... And if this is disappointing with participants, how shall one feel when this kind of reactions comes from... trainers?

The values and purpose of international youth activities, namely in relation to human rights and intercultural learning

As Hendrik Otten has reminded us "it is necessary to point out that European level training is not a value in itself and is not necessarily superior to other training activities"[1]. These activities in a context and are supposed to produce the desired results defined, more or less democratically, by their promoters.

Intercultural learning

Be them carried out in the framework of the European commission's programmes, in the Council of Europe's or in any other one, all European/International youth activities correspond to objectives and purposes that, from the institutional point of view, are as much political or educational. Among them, the promotion of peace, cooperation, human rights, tolerance and active citizenship - including in a very prominent place European citizenship - to which one must add specific personal, local or organisational development objectives defined by the organisers, the target group or the trainers/facilitators. This is probably an area that strongly characterizes international youth activities, as opposed to national or local activities.

As we have seen above, many of the "tools" popularised in the recent years, have also been produced with this purpose, intercultural learning remaining a necessary and fundamental feature, implicit or explicit, of international youth activities.

But what does intercultural learning mean today and what should it imply when we speak about educational tools?

Intercultural learning is perhaps becoming the poor parent of programmes where it used to be at the centre: with the mainstreaming of human rights education, of experiential learning, outdoor education and methodologies such as those borrowed from the Boal's theatre methods, intercultural learning is certainly less visible. If this is true, it would be troubling and indeed, would pose a risk, in my opinion. For, no matter how globalised our societies are - and a globalisation of goods and capital, not of people! - or precisely because of that (!), we need to learn and help learning to truly appreciate, respect and engage in constructive communication with people from other cultural backgrounds. This pre-supposes:

• The ability to recognise and address one's own prejudice and ethnocentric perspectives on the world and other people;

• The ability to empathise with the other, including the ability to work face-to-face (and not only in a simulated experience)

• The capacity to develop and practice one's own tolerance of ambiguity;

• The capacity to understand culture, cultural relativism and the relativism of culture.

Ultimately, all this implies recognising diversity as "the recognition of the unknown, i.e. to be tolerant to the ambiguity and the uncertainty that represents in our lives the existence of multiple Others. And that recognizing the unknown we often project on the Other our own desires, fears, ideas, phantoms and superstitions"[2], in short, our imaginary of prejudice meaning that the Other, the Different, is always and often mostly a subjective interpretation that is mine. So, to come to "all different-all equal" matters, intercultural learning ought to take into account the permanent tension between difference and equality. This requires, form the trainer/multiplier a pluriverse of abilities (cognitive, pragmatic and emotional) to claim and "recognise difference when equality de-characterizes oneself or a community" and to claim for equality when difference discriminates an individual or a group. And this is not all given throough one method or tool.

Human rights education

None of this needs to be explicitly present in an educational activity for young people, but it should be a competence area for youth workers and trainers active in this field. A human rights culture, after all, is not merely a culture where everyone knows their rights - because knowledge does not necessarily equal respect, and without respect, we shall always have violations. A human rights culture is a network of interlocking attitudes, beliefs, behaviours, norms and regulations. Understanding these can give us hooks on which to hang the work we carry out within our groups. And this, we can say, is very important for young people.

The experience of producing and working with Compass has been particularly rich because, on the one hand, it includes the European training of trainers and multipliers and, on the other hand, it gives possibilities for us to see those trainers in action in national training courses or in local pilot projects with a focus on human rights education. This confirms three important assumptions:

• Human rights education requires trained trainers, not only activists and motivated people;

• Trainers need to be also knowledge-managers, i.e. they need to have a basic knowledge of the issues and of the educational processes that they propose and organise including, if necessary, to know where to address themselves for specialised competences;

• Trainers need to be creators and re-creators: they need to be able to adapt the methodological framework of Compass to the local realities and concerns of the young people or trainers that they are working with.

It is also clear to us that any tools that help facilitating learning processes need to take into account the following principles, outlined in Compass but that don't apply to human rights education only, namely:

• to always start from what young people already know, their opinions and experiences and from this base enable them to search for, and discover together, new ideas and experiences - i.e. be also learner-centred in this respect;

• to encourage the participation of young people to contribute to discussions and to learn from each other as much as possible, including cooperative learning;

• to encourage people to translate their learning into simple but effective actions that demonstrate their rejection of injustice, inequality and violations of human rights. This learning for human rights is essential to make young people relate what they learn to themselves and to their own lives.

The learner-centred approach that many of us advocate ought, obviously, to remind us all the time that the "tool" is not the centre of things, but the participants involved in the activity(!) and what they can benefit (learn) from the tool.

As for the broader socio-educational agenda, this should include five rationalities, or perspectives on the world:

A "cosmopolitan rationality": "a way of thinking that does not waste any person, knowledge, experience and by doing so, rises and amplifies the possibilities of finding the ‘right' and harmonious answers to our demands and ensure that all single persons or community have a place in our world."[3]

"A ‘citizenship rationality', implying - as in a Freire approach - that all educational activities are engaged with personal and collective emancipation"³; therefore, we can not separate action and thinking; transformative learning must be part of the non-formal education agenda.

"An ‘ecological rationality' which does not separate humans from others creatures and the context of common sustainability"³. The ecological dimension looks not only at the present of societies but also at their future and their future within the future of the planet. It calls upon an awareness of sustainable development that includes a fairer and wiser use of resources.

A ‘non-sexist rationality' that takes seriously and systematically into account the persisting inequalities and injustice between females and males; we do know that discrimination, violence and poverty against women continue deeply rooted in European societies.

Finally, we need a ‘pacifist rationality', based in co-operation and not in polarization and aims to empower everybody and not obliterate any person. This rationality sees conflicts as an opportunity of personal and group positive growth and transformation based on non-violence. "A ‘pacific rationality' allow us to be aware about our competences for communication, non-violent conflict resolution and peace and by doing so, to put into question the efficacy and the social value of war, violence or disregard for Human Dignity and Human Rights."³

 

The dilemmas encountered in developing and using educational tools

These are all very high principles and very ambitious approaches. How does this connect to educational tools?

If educational tools are understood as the media that facilitate learning process, they need to be developed further and, at the same time, their role has to be de-mystified. This means that they should not be given more importance than the purpose or issue that they are supposed to address and, similarly, that they can not be held "responsible" for frustrations or failures in educational activities.

What is referred to as educational tools usually encompasses group work activity of various kinds and nature. Their purpose is, most often, to explore the potential generated by group work for individual development and learning. Learning is, however, essentially an individual activity and process (even if supported and conditioned by the group). Where, in the process is the time for individual follow-up and support (knowing that the groups used for the international activities tend to be ephemerous)?

Because they happen in a specific international and intercultural atmosphere, the role of the ability to perform (or under-perform) in an international group is often neglected (and even more so when such activities are increasingly mono-lingual). I am very often surprised at how youth workers who "under-perform" and are invisible in international groups to the verge of being a burden, actually act in a very professional and productive manner when working in their environment. Worryingly, the converse is also true, as if our activities sometimes invited for the professional learner who is very good in international groups and perform very poorly at home (if at all). Do the methods that we tend to opt for and consider adequate implicitly favour some type of learning styles and personalities over others?

In an increasingly English-only communication environment, how do we make sure that the cultural biases that educational "tools" also potentially carry are adequately addressed and corrected?

How much importance is given to the other elements that influence the learning in an international activity, namely the group, the learning environment and context, the preparation and the support to the follow-up?

Experience seems to confirm the supremacy of the praxis over the reflection, but this is far from being pacific. The inability to place the actions for human rights education (or and intercultural learning) with young people in a broader social and educational framework ends up resulting in inferiority complex or of an unaccomplished project. The harmonious cooperation in the triangle youth work- youth research - youth policy is not only less harmonious than envisaged; it also seems to fail to produce communication and working methods that render the cooperation effective and efficient.

Whether we talk about HRE or intercultural learning, the challenges are always related to two inner tensions of youth work practice: to remain sufficiently open, simple, accessible and attractive to youth work practices (and, a fortiori, to young people) and, at the same time, to become credible, accepted, recognised and valued by the scientific community for whom good practice is not enough if not backed by a capacity to reflect and communicate results according to the established cannons. So, to which extent aren't we victims of the success of the tools and, therefore, become their slaves? Can we ever ensure that tools will be used only for the purpose and in the spirit that they were created? How many trainers can make a presentation without "Power Point"?

How to ensure "popularity" with quality?

 

Quality factors

The question of quality is, in fact, central to this debate. While we may be impressed and flattered by the envious attitude of formal education professionals when talking about what we do, we also know that the parameters for quality and standards in the practice of NFE are much more flexible than in many formal education systems. Not that it necessarily makes a difference - what makes non-formal education what it is, is that it is non-formal. But it does reflect some of the challenges that we sometimes face, such as:

• How do we ensure that practitioners are ready and able to get the most out of the educational tools we provide?

• How far are new tools tested and developed across a wide range of practitioners and in different cultural and social environments?

• How does the usage of a method, game or activity, secure that the learning objectives are effectively reached and pursued?

• How can we ensure that translations and adaptations remain faithful to the spirit and intentions of the activity?

Obviously, we can not really provide easy answers to all these questions. And probably we don't even need to.

But it is in our hands to avoid pretending that we ignore them. And this is, obviously not a matter of tools or not tools, but of quality tools and quality training for the practitioners using those tools.

To quote again Hendrik Otten, "one could speak of high quality when the youth work offered is situation-, subject- and object-appropriate, i.e. when it is geared to and carried out in accordance with the individual's personal situation and needs and when superior politico-educational objectives can be fully integrated and mediated."

So, hopefully, we'll not be afraid of open the Pandora's box of educational tools and rather be glad that the tools for our educational work contribute to our participants opening many Pandora's boxes that are still closed to them.

And, in doing so, contribute to the key purpose of youth work, to provide opportunities for young people to shape their futures and their societies'.

 

Rui Gomes, 1 November 2006

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[1] Hendrik Otten, Study on high-quality trainers' competencies necessary for developing and implementing European level training activities in the youth field and possible approaches for the assessment of these competencies. Council of Europe, 2002.

[2] Teresa Cunha in "Recognising the Unknown", paper presented at the Diversity Fouth Forum, Budaspest 25-29 October 2006

[3] Teresa Cunha, op. cit. in supra