Climb up wherever you are. Your path is like a scrapbook, a handful of pages to revisit, decisions made, inadvertent high scores and lucky mistakes. What factors have brought you to where you are?
Orbital Logbooks allows you to browse through a collage of impressions that ten professionals from the field of education have collected over the course of a year in their field journals.
The journey is an infinite, circular itinerary, which we encourage you to follow as you like so that you lose yourself in the different stages that make up the landscape of empowerment.
Empowerment is a continuous, infinite journey. The circle you will see next aims to be its representation. In it are situated, in the form of coloured circumferences, the different stages of the empowerment process that ten professionals in the field of education have defined with their thoughts and reflections. By selecting them, you will be able to see what stage they refer to and you will discover the materials made to describe it.
The different colours correspond to three types of resources:
The green circumferences contain pages from field journals.
The orange ones, audio-visual pieces on specific topics, recorded by the educators themselves.
The yellow ones contain fragments of four focus groups where participants shared experiences.
Through these materials, you will be able to delve into the meaning of a term as abstract and multifaceted as that of youth empowerment; circulating through its stages, from prior reflection to the evaluation of the results obtained.
In the menu on the top right, you can learn more about the project and also access an archive of the materials, where you can filter them by specific concepts and interests.
This page has been elaborated following the recommendations of the use of non-sexist language. Therefore, as far as possible, we have used generic expressions that include gender diversity.
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“I’m Jonàs Carbonés Camps, I live ensconced in the Alta Garrotxa, in the valley of the river Llierca, in Montagut and I work for Orió Eduserveis.
I go where public institutions let me go and, so far, I have been lucky enough to work as an open environment educator with young people at risk of social exclusion in Figueres: meet a person and move around for a time in their life with them, with the aim of supporting them in complex situations that they should never have lived or had to face. I have also worked as a tutor for a Shared Schooling Unit in Vidreres teaching classes and leading projects with young people who have not been able to stomach the system of conventions and high school methods of content retaining.”
November 30th, 2018
We always make decisions in every job we have. In my job as a street tutor in the Medi Obert project, these decisions are the core, the most dense, transcendental and condescendent part of the job. Some of these decisions have to do with more important matters, with more “substance” (having in mind the little weight some of my decisions may have, at least in the more visible or exposed part).
Every decision starts with a series of more or less specific questions:
“ Which should be the focus/duration of an intervention with a teenager?”
“Do I suggest him to go to kickboxing classes with Rachid?
Do I suggest to Sergi’s mother to ask for an urgent appointment at CSMJ?”
Some of these decisions are about aspects that are chosen in a continuous way. Decisions about specific possibilities that are always the same, framed and limited, and repeated in a recurring way:
“ This week, should I talk about
Yassin’s reactions with
him and his mom, or just with him? Should I see these teenagers or those others? Do I program coordinations with this service or with this other?”
Then, there are decisions I made in a spontaneous, even creative, way. This improvisation insitu is what complicates it the most, it is the most difficult part and the one that has to do the most with empowerment.
When a young person is hurt or worried about something and tells you this… What do I say to comfort or guide him/her a little?
And then, before doing it, asking yourself… Is guiding them the best in this situation? Or maybe being lost and fighting with his/her opinions is what’s best?
We have to ask ourselves, especially, we have to ask them. What and how is the teenager’s experience?
