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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.

Orbital logbooks
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 Irene Mir i Aiguadé and I work as a teacher of educational guidance and an educational psychologist at the Can Periquet high school in Palau Solità i Plegamans.

My job is to support boys and girls in the field of education in order to care for them in their diversity and to work for an inclusive, open and flexible education, which allows them to achieve rich, competent, motivating learning, along with personal well-being. To reach this goal this view also needs to be shared with the rest of the teaching staff and the educational community. We need to work for the common good, as citizens and as people, with our emotions and our experiences.

For me, my job is passion, intensity and sensitivity towards others and towards myself."

May 15th, 2019

 

         As professionals, we should be careful with what we promise or say to students, and see if we can really fulfill them or not because that could be disappointing; even though we don’t see it or they don’t show it, the trust bond with that student can become weak. That’s why, if we don’t know something or how something is going to turn out, it’s better to explain to them that we don’t have it clear or that they can ask a reference.

(…) What works best for me is that they (the students) can see me as a person with feelings and pain. Obviously with my limits, because I’m still their teacher and I’m responsible for them, but I think

that we can explain things to them without “playing dumb” or as if they can’t understand. I think they value that this closeness is more transparent, and that after it’s easier for me to set the limits or consequences, so that this bond is not “being pals”, but rather of the trust this person has for you, who’s trying to be understanding, putting a distance to not be their friend, but an adult that is there for them.

Sometimes, there are teachers that think that students are trophies, who is more obedient or who is less problematic. For me it’s better to have this closeness in small groups or individually, to show interest in their wellbeing and giving them a space in a more understanding way, without judging how they feel or what they do. Rules without an

argument or understanding of why they are necessary rarely work on students. It’s not about explaining everything, but the authority or leadership role we have for them should be inspiring, not authoritative or disciplinary, and the work should be for them, not for our comfort or system. Only that way things will work.

A professional should be capable of working for the group he/she has in front, creating bonds of trust and confidence, empathy and teamwork. Over time, classrooms, methodologies and teachers change the way of teaching so it’s important learning how to adapt to a more diverse context that offers opportunities so everybody can learn, bearing in mind their background. Evidently, we need a leader that carries

out all of this, but this leadership has to be “from the emotion”*.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*This concept of “being a leader from the emotion” was taken from Xesco Espar, but I relate a lot to that in the way I am, and how I think my job should be.

Irene Mir; high school teacher
#bond #evaluation #irene #responsibility