Skip

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.
SCROLL
|


"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."

February 25th, 2019

 

         I have a student who is recently discovering her sexual orientation. One day she came up to me to talk, and explained to me that she had met someone outside school and had become very good friends. She thought she might be in love with her. She was confused. I asked her what she needed, and she said she needed to talk about it. So, I looked for a space between us, so I could listen to her.

(…) I think I have contributed to her wellbeing, and I have helped her put words to the feelings and emotions that maybe she couldn’t express. From this, I think I have helped her organize her thoughts and make the decision of “what

to do” or how to face it.

(…) I have listened to her a lot and have tried to put words to the things she struggled to say. (…) My intervention is destined to normalize all feelings that we have around love, both positive and negative. Also to know how to differentiate when we love someone from having a crush, etc. Finally, I tried to work the subject of talking about this to someone she trusted because she felt bad that she couldn’t tell this to her best friend. At this point, we also worked a little on the fact that we need to know who we can explain these things and try to anticipate how they will react, if that’s the right person to tell these things or not. I tried to talk asking reflexive questions, without telling her what I think she should do. (…)

With these questions, she could start structuring and organizing her feelings. We rounded it up in four spheres: Personal (how I feel and how I can manage it), social (what would happen if I talk about this, what would happen if I don’t: gains and losses), family (how they can be supportive), and reciprocity (how I know or interpret if someone likes me or not: which factors do intervene? Not just my own self, her own self, the environment, the moment, the situation of each person, etc.).

The truth is that I have a bit of a dilemma as to know to what extent I could help her or if I was the right person to do so. I’m her teacher, and I don’t know if I’m overstepping because I think this is a very personal matter. What started as a space to listen

became, in my opinion, a space for learning. Making these discomfort and conflicts too invisible, and work on them later make them harder to manage.

 

Irene Mir; high school teacher
#bond #friendship #irene #mediation #metalearning