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ON STAGE Transfer Workshop delivered in Vienna

May 29th 2014, Wien, Österreich

 

On the 29th of May 2014 the transfer workshop was organised and delivered in Vienna, Austria. The objective of the workshop was to present the two previous projects, BRIDGE and WRITING THEATRE, upon which the concept of ONSTAGE was based. Analytically, the BRIDGE Project aimed at preventing prejudice and discrimination for second generation immigrants, by improving the competencies and knowledge of adult education teachers and trainers, in terms of the social situation and specific needs, of the adult second generation immigrants. On the other hand, the WRITING THEATRE project aimed at transforming the way teachers, trainers, counsellors, social workers, etc. provide their services, through the development and promotion of the creative competences via drama techniques within interventions addressed to young people at risk of socio-occupational exclusion.

 

In total 11 trainers and counsellors attended the workshop and actively participated at the activities carried out. The duration of the workshop was one working day. The methodologies and tools presented were a variety of innovative, active techniques, aimed at fostering active participation, exchange of ideas and opinions, as well as motivation techniques, which are very important, especially if applied to the ONSTAGE target group (i.e. Immigrants who need to improve their employability skills). In specific, through the application of these methodologies, it is clearly intended to make participants feel comfortable to open up, share their experiences and their background, feel accepted and enhance, together with their peers, new skills and competencies, which will help them improve their professional profile, while at the same time, building their self-awareness.

In particular, some of the activities presented during the transfer workshop and were originated from the BRIDGE project, included  creative self-presentation, narratives, life story approach, Paulo Freire‘s philosophy and approach, as well as the autobiographical approach. The main objectives of these activities were to make participants feel comfortable, by sharing their own experiences with their peers, to enhance their feeling of trust and, most importantly, to understand their potential and invest on it, in order to improve their professional profile.

As far as the WRITING THEATRE project was concerned, the methodologies presented were imaginative improvisation, emotional improvisation, physical improvisation, narrative improvisation and collective writing. These activities were intended to promote the building of trust among the participants, communication channels and facilitate group work towards achieving a common objective. The most important element of the activities shared was that the participants felt very comfortable and actively participated in all of them.

The participants were asked to provide concrete recommendations concerning the pilot sessions due to be organised and delivered in their country. The majority of the comments provided indicated that the transfer workshop provided a very good basis of practical examples on how to use the techniques which constitute the basis of the ONSTAGE project. Nevertheless, some participants feel that any trainer/ teacher should also possess the theoretical background of the techniques, in order to be more creative and use the tools in the most effective way possible.

Finally, the participants commented that when it comes to the young people who are expected to benefit from the ONSTAGE project, the trainer who uses these very effective tools should also include in the programme a debriefing session, aimed at summarising the activity, with the objective set and the new knowledge gained.