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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 3rd, 2019

 

              I would like to talk about those young migrants who have come here alone, unaccompanied, and who, therefore, have been tutored by the Administration. What happens when they turn 18 and leave this tutelage? Some of them, if they have had a very good process – and having a very good process means doing everything that the majority of 17-year-olds here would not do: being late a single day, arguing, getting caught with a bit of weed because you were having a laugh with friends… –, if they have not done anything that most teenagers do, they have the opportunity of having a place to live when they became of age.

 

The determining factors, however, don’t end here. There are other obligatory determinants: they will have to study or work. For them, access to the job market is almost impossible because they do not have work permits, so they have to continue their training and be continuously active. This is the profile of an 18-year-old teenager.

What happens when a kid with this profile comes to me for their training on how to become a waiter, for example? They arrive without any real interest in becoming waiters, without a clear conception of what being a waiter means or implies, and, above all, with a general lack of motivation and a desire to finish training without having to study too much. In short, they begin training just “to be doing something”.

When the process of learning and understanding not just the trade, but all of the transversal skills that it brings into play and that derive from the very needs of the job really begins, one of two things can happen: that they really feel motivated and find in this trade a good job opportunity, or that none of this happens.

When it does not happen, a very complex situation is created, and as an education professional it is very difficult to find a resource that will help them get out of this spiral of feeling unmotivated. Motivation is not something that can be taught or given. You can encourage them, but motivation is intrinsic. They have to discover what is the internal engine that can help them with the process of growth, and sometimes they

don’t have enough time or opportunities to find this engine. If this happens to you when you have your family beside you and you realise you made a mistake with your decisions, you have a buffer that will help you get back up, get back on your feet and try to keep looking for that motivation. These young people, however, do not have this buffer. If they fall once, they might be lifted up; if they fall a second time, they will rarely find a very good professional to lift them up; if they fall a third time, they will not get back up.

This is what concerns me about empowerment processes, which basically consist of finding this internal motivation that makes you choose your path and start making your decisions driven by motivation. 

I am concerned that there is a significant part of the population that does not have the same opportunities, because their environment and their socioeconomic and family situation does not allow them.

Jose Alonso; social educator
#autonomy #critical_incidents #economic_resources #jose #public_policies