PROJECT OUTPUTS
In order to strengthen active democratic participation among young adults in Europe and combat current negative trends, the "Courage" operative partnership - consisting of educational providers, social and pedagogic experts from the UK, Austria, Romania, Norway and Germany - in cooperation with their selected associated partners- will bring together their multidisciplinary expertise to develop 4 intellectual outputs:
1. Me and My Courage Self-Study Manual
The self-study manual will equip trainers with necessary theoretic knowledge of what basic civic competences are and how to deliver these to the learners. There will be special focus on how to address young adult learners to meet their needs and interest in civil courage and how to create innovative learning activities in a interactive way and in cooperation with professionals that have competences in “non-pedagogical/non-school” approaches to the topic of civil courage. Trainers will learn how to plan, organise and deliver such contents and will strengthen their knowledge about civic courage and active empowerment of young adult learners (e.g. biographic work, self-reflection encouragement). This is essential, as the project consortium aims to deliver an approach without moralising, but encouraging end users instead.
2. Me and My Courage Case Box
The Courage Case Box will substantially deliver concrete and practical material for trainers, giving them examples of how to empower low-skilled young adults via a more comprehensive understanding of basic skills provision, i.e. including and highlighting civil courage competence elements. For this, carefully selected real life scenarios will serve to exemplify and establish respective educational activities. E.g.:
* violence (verbal, physical) in everyday life
* racism in public places
* emergency situations
* mobbing
* active discrimination of disadvantaged/vulnerable individuals or groups
At the same time, the Case Box will show concrete and corresponding experiential methods, tools, instruments, exercises for scenario learning, e.g.:
* role plays
* perspective-change exercises
* paradox interaction
* psychodrama
* interviewing neighbours
* outdoor activities
* physical activities
* campaign pretending
* biographic work/reflection
* group dynamics activities
* security measures, how to help and react
* short film productions in different scenarios
3. Civic Courage Showcases
Via this innovative intellectual output, educators will be able to motivate and stimulate their participants to become more aware of their environment and to become more “courageous” in daily life. The intellectual output O3 demonstrates the national testing of real life cases in relation to civic courage and its illustrative form with a concrete thematic field. Each partner country will have a specific focus, according to the activity focus and "embedding potential" of their associated partner(s).
4. Policy Recommendations
As the project consortium aims at extensive dissemination and exploitation of the intellectual outputs developed throughout its life time, it is believed that policy and implementation recommendations will strongly help interested organizations to make use of the developed material. The recommendation output will contain a concrete realization plan for multipliers and stakeholders. It will analyse and demonstrate how the material can be adapted to specific needs and integrated into existing programmes of other institutions or how new courses/respective modules can be setup in an efficient and practical way.