GO VISUAL: Visual Thinking Tools for Youth Workers Dealing With Integration of Migrants And Refugees

Özet, Erasmus+ Project Results platformunda yayımlanan İngilizce metindir.

Global threats such as terroristic attacks and armed conflicts caused a huge refugee and migration wave in Europe. These and many other factors stipulate increasing of intolerance, xenophobia, violence, conflicts oriented by cultural fears, numerous stereotypes and prejudices, intercultural misunderstanding, inability to think critically and lack of intercultural competence in general. Young people are more than others affected by those issues which leads to negative consequences.

In the current reality, finding ways to build a dialogue and establish efficient communication between migrants, refugees and local community is extremely important. Unfortunately, when migrants come to a new community , they don’t know the local language or culture, which makes integration process rather challenging.That’s why alternative methods of communication as well as methods of education are very helpful in this situation. Thus, creative methods and tools can help to integrate these youth to the educational process, as exciting creative methods can “hook” young people.

The project GO VISUAL Visual thinking tools for youth workers dealing with integration of migrants and refugees was born from the idea to empower youth workers, youth trainers and educators to use creative methods in education and equip them with skills of graphic facilitation, graphic recording, infographics and other tools in order to foster / ensure non-violent communication in educational process addressing current challenges such as intercultural dialogue in the work with migrants and refugees in order to prevent radicalization of young people and to develop critical thinking abilities.

The migrants and refugees are often not accepted by the receiving society as they are often seen as a threat to social, cultural and economic wealth of a local community, and, unfortunately, this stereotypical image is so wide spread, that many young people believe in it.

We, from our side, believe, that visual thinking tools is the best way to deal with stereotypes in the heads of people, as, by using these tools, we, as youth workers, can change / replace negative images by positive ones much faster.

This LTTC is vital now,as young people live through a challenging moment of our society development: refugee wave, recent terroristic attracts, economic crisis, unemployment, violation of human rights and hate speech, lack of dialogue, inability to appreciate and even handle diversity brought more and more frustration an challenges to young people’s lives.

And youth workers, trainers became essential actors in the process of change: they are not only educators, but also supporters, mediators, leaders, coaches, guides, mentors etc.

It helps young people to grow faster and develop the “survival” set of competences those that cannot be developed in any other circumstances such as tolerance, mutual understanding and respect, non-violent communication skills critical thinking and many others.

This training course will consist of 2 parts. The first TC ( 07-15 April 2018 , Austria) will focus on visual thinking tools and graphic facilitation as well as using infographics and other visualization tools.

The 2nd TC (21-29 July 2018,Russia) will focus on the usage of digital visual thinking methods in youth work with migrants and refugees in general and the area of their applicability in work with various inclusion groups as well as on the reflection of the opportunities and limits this approach has.

The LTTC objectives:
To increase awareness of using visual thinking tools in youth work with migrants and refugees
To learn what are those tools and how to apply them to concrete educational practice
To create a common “graphical vocabulary” that can be shared with more youth trainers and youth workers afterwards
To explore different art and graphic techniques and define how they can be useful in work with various inclusion groups
To try out different techniques and identify what fits more to participants’own personal facilitating style and educational environment
To become more self-expressive and to reduce risks of misunderstanding
To learn how to stimulate critical thinking with creative tools
to promote non-violent communication through using creative methods and tools
To discover the limits and the opportunities of using creative and visual tools in education
To share good practices and challenges in using visual tools

The project is designed for 35 participants from 14 countries – youth workers, trainers, coaches and educators who actively work at different levels. Methodology will be non-formal, non-frontal, highly-participative.

The main desired impact of the project is raising awareness on how to use creative, visual tools in youth work especially working with the topics of inclusion, participation and human rights, to improve human rights education and development of competences of an educator multiplication of the number of youth-led initiatives.