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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 Jose Alonso Represa. I was born in and live in the Raval district of Barcelona. I have been working as a social educator for more than 25 years, specializing in the field of guidance and job finding. Much of my professional career has been spent at the Casal d'infants (children’s centre) del Raval and at the Fundació Èxit where I continue to collaborate today.

At the moment I’m working as a social consultant and trainer specialized in guidance methodologies (skills, employability, tutorial action), labour mediation and corporate volunteering. In addition to the Fundació Exit, I collaborate with the Diputació de Barcelona (Government body) giving guidance talks and carrying out training for people looking for work with different town councils and with the Associació Adonar de València."

May 31st, 2019

 

 

             I would like to talk about Zahid’s experience, a teenager who attended the Exit Foundation and whose process has been exemplary.

He arrived here alone, at the age of 16, from Pakistan. He received tutelage from the administration and began one of our Training and Insertion Programmes on electricity. He said that he wanted to be an electrician because he liked it and thought that it could be a useful job which he could do relatively easily. He finished the programme and went onto an intermediate training degree in electricity. 

While he was doing all of that, he started to attend a meetup where they organized outings to the mountains. He loved it and was very motivated by these outings, and we realized when we talked to him that he was enthusiastic about the mountain, that he had also started running races and marathons and that he was passionate and eager to continue getting involved.

When he finished the formation, he came to talk to me and explained that he was looking at how he could continue his education. He told me that he was thinking about doing a university degree in engineering. I asked him whether he was sure he wanted to do that. I made him see that he was always out in the mountains whenever he could, that he had started running marathons and that

he showed high professional skills for it, that he was much more motivated by that than by his training in the field of electricity. I remember telling him: “do whatever you want, but I don’t see you as an engineer, in telecommunications nor as an electrician… you will earn a good living but, is it what you like?”.

In the end he decided to direct his education towards what he was passionate about. He has just handed in his end-of-degree paper for his Sports degree; a paper based on a personal project that aims to connect social services and the mountains, focusing on how to help those kids who are in the same situation that he experienced.

What role did we play in his empowerment, or maturation process, that has allowed him to find his place, 

his path, while also doing it in a charitable way? I couldn’t say. Perhaps when I questioned him whether he should pursue engineering instead of continuing in the line of sports. But I honestly don’t know. I think it’s about the accompaniment, being beside them, talking and listening.

Jose Alonso; social educator
#autonomy #bond #critical_capacity #jose #mentorship