This Strategic Partnership project brings together organisations active in the field of non-formal education in 4 European countries. The consortium consists of a diverse range of educational providers with various level of experience, international involvement, target groups and history. All the participating organisations identified citizenship and media education as a priority topic for them and decided to make the topic their strategic focus. This project will help them to concentrate during a period of 2 years on developing innovative approaches in their work with the learners through the use of non-formal education. The ethos of the project is centred around media education and citizenship. We believe that an active citizen needs to have competences in work with media. Citizens need to be able to understand and process information from media, think critically about them, look for alternative sources of information, be able to identify media manipulation etc. All these are important skills. At the same time it is difficult to learn these through formal education. That is why non-formal education is ideal. Media education is very much based on attitudes and skills rather than mere knowledge. Therefore, non-formal education is an important tool in promoting media education. Non-formal education is suitable for working with attitudes and skills of learners. The learners need a positive educational experience to become active citizens. The project will enable us to design new and innovative methodology to use for media education. The methodology is described in the section below. The objectives of the project are: - To enable the participating organisations to focus strategically on media and citizenship education - To facilitate exchange of experience and good practices, collect existing resources and valorise existing expertise within the organisations - To use the existing know-how to create new innovative methodology for media and citizenship education, to test this methodology and improve it, thus enhasing the quality of the learning methods in non-formal education field - To explore possibilities to connect non-formal education with modern information and communication technologies - To establish deeper and sustainable partnership among the participating organisations - To provide unique learning experience to the learners participating in the blended mobilities, improving all their Key Competences, as well as working on the recognition of the non-formal education frame acquired experience - To empower young people with fewer opportunities - To have a concrete impact on the employability of young people, involved in the current project.
The strategic partnership “TWEET: The World of Education and Enhancement via Technology” was a first of a kind project that Together asbl has developed together with our partners from Europe: Turkey, Bulgaria and Macedonia. All the participating organisations identified citizenship and media education as a priority topic for them and decided to make the topic their strategic focus. This project helped all the partners to concentrate during a period of 2 years on developing innovative approaches in the youth work through the use of non-formal education. We believe that an active citizen needs to have competences in work with media. This is especially actual for young people. Citizens need to be able to understand and process information from media, think critically about them, look for alternative sources of information, be able to identify media manipulation etc. All these are important skills. At the same time it is difficult to learn these through formal education. That is why non-formal education is ideal. According to all these needs, Together asbl in coordination with our project partners have established common objectives of the project such as: - To enable the participating organizations to focus strategically on media and citizenship education - To facilitate exchange of experience and good practices, collect existing resources and valorize existing expertise within the organizations - To use the existing know-how to create new innovative methodology for media and citizenship education, to test this methodology and improve it, thus enhancing the quality of the learning methods in non-formal education field - To explore possibilities to connect non-formal education with modern information and communication technologies - To establish deeper and sustainable partnership among the participating organizations - To provide unique learning experience to the learners participating in the blended mobilities, improving all their Key Competences, as well as working on the recognition of the non-formal education frame acquired experience - To empower young people with fewer opportunities - To have a concrete impact on the employability of young people, involved in the current project. In a frame of our strategic partnership, we organized several international meetings and seminars with the young people and youth workers and youth leaders in order to exchange practices and to develop a final design tool in the form of publication with selected working methods as well as we have developed an intranet platform that will also serve for the organisations involved also after the project.