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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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"My name is Lluís Rubió and I live in the region of La Garrotxa, specifically in Olot. I am someone who is very involved in my town’s social movements and I find it very difficult to just stand back and not act in the face of an injustice, especially those that affect people.

I stand politically on the left of the left, and I guess that’s why I tried to make headway on this issue by studying a Diploma in Social Education.

I have been working in the field of youth for more than ten year and I have done it and I still do it from different positions and places: from the judicial system to leisure. I currently work as an Education and Youth Expert at La Vall d'en Bas Town Council.”

April 22nd, 2019

 

When we work with people, we have a hard time establishing methodological criteria. Although, theoretically, our studies and training emphasize the creation of profiles of specific young people, we must keep in mind that each person will continue to be unique and each one has to face empowerment processes in a different way. 

On a theoretical level, all education professionals know that we must follow certain steps, but we must also know that these steps are completely modifiable. In fact, if something distinguishes education, it’s that it does not have a rigid structure, but rather, it

is sketched and transformed at the same pace that we learn and establish educational relationships. Education is a process that is built in parallel and is shared among educators, students, external agents, resources, etc., it’s not just knowledge that is transmitted unilaterally.

Obviously, it is important to have some training and a somewhat defined structure before initiating any educational activity. Personally, there are a series of steps that I always follow: first, I get rid of all the labels that can suppress the kid (labels that come from neighbourhoods, from school…) to try to ensure that they do not condition the way I interact with them. It’s very difficult because we live in the world full of labels, but precisely because of it, this

task distinguishes a good professional.

The second thing I always do is approach the young person in a personal way: talking to them one-to-one, trying to establish affective bonds and transmitting them a lot of emotionality.

From this point on, I could draw a structure with axes and phases that are very clearly defined, but if we understand the educational process as a shared process, inevitably the periods and phases get lengthened, shortened or even skipped. In the architecture of youth empowerment processes, we must stand up for flexibility, we should not be afraid of breaking schemes, tearing and redoing cards and, above all, we should not be afraid of making mistakes. Structures exist to be broken and no matter how much they served us once,

it’s possible that they will never serve us again, or that the structure will serve us to build another one or to realise that we shouldn’t use it. It’s positive to have structural references of very standardized processes, but in the end these only have to serve us to start building the process in a shared way, one-to-one, with each kid.

Lluís Rubió; Education and youth expert
#bond #lluís #mentorship #negotiation #participation