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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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"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."

January 4th, 2019

 

       When we speak, as adults, teenagers, or kids, we assume that the other can understand us. We interpret what we say is comprehensible to the one that’s listening, and we rarely pay attention to the how and when we do it. (…) The teengaer usually answers without thinking much, in a less conscious and more impulsive way. (…) Many times the alternatives to the answers given in similar situations are unknown to them because they haven’t internalized yet other forms of communication that sound “less aggressive” or “passive.” (…) To me, an empowered person is able to choose the type of answer they give, according to the objective that they are

aiming for (be that getting into a fight, not getting involved in anything, or simply be more assertive avoiding a possible conflict).
The empowered person doesn’t just stay with one answer but is capable of choosing what answer they give because they have the skills and abilities to do it, and therefore, they can adapt more or less properly to the situations that they may encounter. Also, the possibility to know what to choose implies that there is a higher degree of autonomy in the teenager, since he/she is able to solve or manage situations with different alternatives, and sometimes be able to avoid the intervention of an adult.

If you ask them why they gave that answer, usually they tell you “I’m just like that”, when in reality it’s because

they haven’t integrated other ways to answer or communicate, and they use that as “justification” or simply because they don’t know what to say. That’s why I tell them to think about what would have happened if they had answered differently, and I give them examples. Sometimes they don’t find the answers or they can sense where I’m going, so they give me the answer that is more appropriate to me, from an adult perspective. I wanted to write about this way of learning social skills because I think that the more social skills we have, the more able we are to be empowered, since there are more cognitive processes and more skills to develop that intervene. 

(…) Another form of young people empowerment is based on imitation, the 

same way children do in their first development stages, I think that young people are still learning more complex processes by imitation, just as adults do.

Irene Mir; high school teacher
#autonomy #critical_capacity #irene #mentorship