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
|


"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."

December 12th, 2018

 

       The term “empowerment”, which we use a lot – as well as “entrepreneurship” and other words like these– does not quite convince me. It’s not that I don’t believe in its meaning, but I think it places a lot of value and status to something that we all go through.

I always try to talk about “maturity processes”. From my own experience and from what I have seen among the youth I have worked with throughout the years, one of the issues that concerns me the most about maturity processes – or growth, or empowerment, call it what you will – is the possibilities that each person has to make mistakes along the steps of this process.

I think that the possibility of making mistakes and the consequences that follow are closely linked to the personal, social, family or economic situation of each young person, therefore, not all young people have the same opportunities to make mistakes and obtain second chances.

Going back to my personal experience, while I was involved with the Children’s Casal and began to establish myself as a social worker, I had friends from my same environment and in similar socio-economic situations who made other decisions and made “mistakes” that they have never been able to take back. Over the years, I realised that if those decisions were pulled out of the social context of that period’s Raval and moved to a neighborhood that is four steps

away, as is the Eixample, surely these kids would have had the opportunity to repeat these decisions and reshape the path they were taking. This situation, which repeats itself even now in different contexts, worries me when I think about maturity or empowerment processes.

Making mistakes makes you grow up: Why don’t we give all young people the same opportunities to make mistakes and rectify them? As a social worker, how can I give these opportunities to the kids I work with, those who normally do not have them? It is a very delicate task in which you have to continually find a balance between your objectives (what is set for you by the social entity or your financiers), and at the same time let the kids clash with reality, make mistakes, go backwards and then forwards again.

Jose Alonso; social educator
#educational_intervention #jose #public_space