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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 years 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."




Illustration: Adrián Palomo.

November 8th, 2018

– 22:04

Today I begin, for the first time, writing a diary; yes, one day before the first deadline… it is possibly one of the moments that best defines my vision on empowerment: Facing the need of…

Some days have passed since the first Focus Group, and time goes on as usual. However, I keep good memories from the session, and it makes me think that we have started something in which me and my colleagues are involved.

The first question I asked myself was “why do people from outside the city always have to go to Barcelona? Don’t we have similar spaces in our regions?” I answer myself “yes”; we have spaces

with TV sets, and some local televisions that surely could have been of use in this project. Right now it’s such a drag to think that we have to go back to Barcelona; it’s a place where I’m not comfortable, where it’s hard for me to move, and where many of the things that happen are unknown or inaccessible to me. 

I think that at many times, the young people I support in my work must feel the same way as I do: in uncomfortable spaces, laziness, difficulties, and lack of awareness… And not just to go to Barcelona, but rather to face their own daily lives.

I imagine the feeling of some of the people I support, getting up every morning to go to school… what a pain…

(I guess I still have those memories from back then!).
This makes me think that many times, when we want to work empowerment, we end up doing it, not from an external, theoretical, etc. point of view, but rather from our own life experiences.

In most cases, educators are happy with our work, we remember with certain complexity everything we’ve been through to get to our current working situation, and we understand that thanks to this experience “we are empowered people who are ready to support the youngsters.”

However… Where does this empowerment come from? I mean, what do I have besides my studies and my job? Do I have the tools to speak with

everybody? Am I able to overcome all the problems I encounter?

The answer to these questions is YES because I consider so, my parents consider so, society consider so…, and therefore, what I can think or say about empowerment only makes sense if I talk about it from myself, being in contact with my fears and victories. I think this is what we have to give young people, specially the ones from the region where I work (La Vall d’en Bas).

We “can’t empower them” nor we “should empower them”. This comes alone when you have a clear relationship with yourself. What I apply in my day-to-day life is: trying to get young people to know themselves first and then to get to know the ones around them.

I think that empowerment is a process that starts, but doesn’t end… it’s a learning process that’s so big that we never really know what means “to empower.”

These days I’ve been with some people of different ages, and I’ve dedicated myself to listen to them and be there for them, asking them about their affairs without digging too deep; slowly building paths, developing strength, creating a bond. Honestly, I think that only the bond can create an educational relationship with assurance.

 

Right now, I am writing this on my computer and I picture my colleagues doing the same… perhaps today, 

yesterday or tomorrow at the last minute. The “fighting” situation of pressure with a blank page reminds me of my days as a university student or even before, when I had to submit a piece of work, and I was doing it always at the last minute.

Lluís, 23:25

Lluís Rubió; Education and youth expert
#bond #concept #educational_intervention #lluís