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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."

March 4th, 2019

Punishment

We consider that the “punishment” has to be consequent with what the student has done. Punish them leaving the student without a particular space without further justification, is maybe not the way to make things better. I think that when a student does something bad and gets punished, usually he/she gets more anxious or upset, and in that state we can’t work any conflicts. Normally, when a student does something incorrect, leaves the classroom and goes to another one to wait for a teacher to come and expects he/she will be getting a good telling-off.  When I come in a room, at the very beginning they would always say (not

anymore because they know me now): What? You’re gonna give me hell, aren’t you? I normally say: No, I came to see how you are. Just by saying that, their attitude changes because they don’t expect that you came to see how they were. They already know that they have done something bad, and they expect a telling-off, a lecture, or whatever. They see you as the enemy that doesn’t understand them. They already know they have done wrong. Maybe they don’t know why they did it, but everybody can tell when they have done something bad to someone or when someone is so anxious that they can’t control themselves.

I try to break with those thoughts and ask them how they are. If I see that they look up at me, I often ask them if I can

sit with them. Usually, they say yes or someone says: Do what you want! But to that I say: Oh, of course, I will have a seat then. I tell them in every moment what I’m doing, trying to break through their expectations of what will happen next. I know that in that moment they don’t need a punishment or a lecture because they are anxious and they don’t even listen to what I say. So, I choose to look for closeness with affection. Even though I know what they did is wrong, this is not the moment to deal with that because I would put them against me, and that’s not my objective. My objective is that they stop seeing me as the enemy, and feel me closer, so we can talk or at least they feel less alone.

Otherwise, if they say: I don’t want you to sit here or get out of here! I say: Okay,

 

 I understand you want to be alone, so if you need anything I will be at the teacher’s lounge! I tell them this so I express that I understand that they want to be alone, that maybe they feel ashamed or that they don’t want to talk about it. To some I say: There’s no need to talk, but I would like to make you company! I tell them this because I think no one likes to be alone when they are sad or upset. It usually works because they don’t reject me. Some take a chair for me, others make some space, others just look at me more, and there are others that ask me why I haven’t sit yet.

Once I have become closer, I say nothing and wait for them to speak first. (…) I make them realize that that’s their moment to speak, they have the opportunity to express themselves freely

without being judged when explaining themselves. I never interrupt them. Sometimes I ask them something to see if they know how their actions make the other person feel, but I do it rarely because in that moment I’m only interested in knowing what’s going on with them. Normally this is a long process because it’s hard for them to trust me for those things. First they need to be relaxed, and then they need to know that you can listen. Sitting at the same level as them is very important; if I’m standing up and they are sitting, that doesn’t create an atmosphere of trust.

When you, as an adult, let them be without asking them to stop (because frequently they can’t stop, they need to vent all that energy somehow, even if the way is not the most appropriate), they

also get surprised and deep down they are grateful that you let them be (as long as everything is more or less under control). The thing is that the fact of sharing any of this student-teacher situations make students see you as someone who listens to them even in the more stressful or conflictive moments, and see a small spark of understanding. (…)

All these situations help the student to see me as equals. Sometimes, to start the conversation I tell them how I feel: I’m worried about you because I don’t know what the matter is, I would like you to explain me what happened. When I express this concern, they notice that someone worries about them, and that makes them feel important or closer to me. But that doesn’t always work.

Irene Mir; high school teacher
#bond #critical_capacity #critical_incidents #irene #mediation #responsibility