We all know that youth work needs to raise awareness about important topics in everyday society and to empower young people to understand them better. In order to do so, youth workers sometimes need to go through (formal) training and then, in their everyday work, address different challenges.

Therefore, today, we are presenting you three contributions dealing with formal education of youth workers and how to approach topics of discrimination and radicalisation, as well as how we can provide better support for refugees and migrants.

Do we need a better connection between academia and practice? How can we use it? What are the trends of youth work education on tertiary level in Europe? And can practitioners teach new generations of youth workers? All of these questions were discussed in the contribution “Tertiary Level Education of Youth Workers – Trends and Opportunities” by Marko Kovačić. The general idea of the workshop was to explore varieties of youth work education at the tertiary level across Europe. The basis for the contribution was a research on higher education youth work curricula, and the aim was to identify commonalities present in formal youth work education. By combining different interactive methods participants got familiarised with main trends in formal education of youth workers, which contributed to a better understanding of potential ways of improving it. Read more about this contribution in the workshop report below.

In the workshop “Dealing with Refugees: The Role of Youth Work and Youth Workers’ Competencies”, Federica Demicheli introduced main reflections and recommendations from the long-term project “Dealing with Refugees: From Challenges to Opportunities”, which was started in 2017 in Jordan by the Finnish, Norwegian, French and Italian National Agencies for Erasmus +: Youth in Action and the SALTO EuroMed Resource Centre in cooperation with Jordanian NGOs and local authorities. The workshop addressed the changing level of the interventions of youth work during the last crisis related to refugees and asylum seekers and analysed the different and specific “social and political” roles that youth workers were/are assuming. Many identified challenges were related to the issue of “fragility”: fragility of the target group, but also fragility of the role of youth workers. Also, there is no full recognition of the status of youth workers in working with refugees and asylum seekers. If you are interested to find out more and read more about potential solutions to the above-mentioned challenges, open the workshop report below!

Help us find Alexander! His mother Sarah and his younger brother Georg have been looking for him for a couple of days now, and all we know is that Alexander Boronnat has gone to a 10th anniversary Erasmus commemorative trip with his peers and has been missing since then. This was the plot of a story told during the contribution called “Gamification to Combat Discrimination and Radicalisation” held by Maria Marinova-Alkalay. The topic of workshop was dealing with youth radicalisation and gamification as a specific tool to combat and raise awareness of the existence of radical/neo-Nazi groups across Europe and their pseudo-patriotic narrative inciting hatred and exclusion. Participants underwent a series of challenges, including a mathematical problem, rebus, coding a letter, matching images to countries, opening a box, tangram and a QR code to find Alexander. If you are interested to find out what happened to Alexander and want to find out more about you can use detective games to introduce human rights education and radicalisation in your work, please consult workshop report below!

Want to get inspired with new practices? Than stay with us, as we are continuing with publishing the workshop reports! Stay tuned! 🙂