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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 Laura Muñoz and I've been a social educator for more than 10 years, by both vocation and conviction. My passion is being able to accompany people in improving their quality of life and to promote their empowerment and independence.

In recent years, I have directed my work towards young people working in the UEC (Shared Schooling Unit), in the supervised apartment accommodation for the promotion of independence, in the Espai Jove, a centre for young people, and as a technical expert for occupational and training guidance in programs of the SOC (Catalan Employment Office) in the Garantia Juvenil (Youth program) such as the Centre for new opportunities and the Singulars project. I am currently the person responsible for youth employment in Palafrugell Town Council and I support young people in improving their employability in order to encourage them to enter the work market.”

June 10th, 2019
Changes

 

        Since I last wrote on this notebook, a lot has happened. The most relevant thing is that I’ve changed my job. I used to work at the Centre of New Opportunities in Girona, where I had direct intervention with young people. I spent many hours with them, face to face, and gave them classes on transversal skills (teamwork, self-esteem, stress and emotion management…) and job hunting.

I’m currently working as an occupation technician at the Baix Empordà Regional Council’s job bank. Leaving a programme halfway through was very hard for me, especially because I spent

so many hours with the same kids, accompanied them extensively and created strong bonds. As a professional, this generated a series of concerns and mixed feelings that made me reflect even more on my role in my field of work. This time around I prioritized myself, but I had to give up other things that I had in my old job and I don’t have now. Still, I choose to remind myself that I was able to experience different ways of working with young people.

Now, my guidance is much more oriented towards job hunting, and I am no longer spending every day hand in hand with the kids; therefore, the accompaniment that I carry out is more superficial and I do not reach such emotional and personal levels as I did before in the other job.

Even so, my experience and professional background now allows me to easily detect cases that need more intensive guidance on a more personal level. Observation, which I have mastered thanks to my old job, allows me to discern who is more autonomous and needs less mentoring, and who, in comparison, needs more emotional support. The search for a job and integration into the job market undoubtedly contribute to youth empowerment, but it always has to be followed by a solid self-esteem. Job counselling sometimes becomes an “excuse” to work at a deeper level, making the whole process culminate in a more real empowerment.

I would like to mention Carla’s example; a 26-year-old girl who had a child when

she was very young. She came to our job orientation programme with the intention of changing her career path. Until then, she had been working as a house cleaner and now she wanted to receive training and work as a warehouse assistant. At the beginning she was very insecure and had many concerns about getting into a sector that was complicated in terms of gender equality. I think that my guidance in this process was useful to mitigate the moments of stress and doubts. In the end, she was the first one to find a job as a warehouse worker and was using all of the logistics vehicles. From the start, they placed a lot of trust on her. 

How do I think I contributed to her empowerment? By doing a lot of individual tutoring, accompanying her 

and constantly observing the situation in order to detect moments when she felt distressed despite not being able to verbalise it. In addition to this observation, it has also been useful to support her on an informal level, not only with individual tutoring, but also via WhatsApp and on the phone; in short, through the resources that young people now use. We must adapt and speak their language; it is the only way to have a real approach.

Laura Muñoz; career guidance
#bond #educational_centre #efficiency #laura #mentorship #self_esteem