The Youth Work eLearning Partnership (YWeLP) is a strategic partnership across five countries (Ireland, Finland, Estonia, Northern Ireland and Australia) seeking Erasmus+ Key Action 2 funding in the Field of Youth for 31 months 2017-2019. YWeLP will create, design and host an eLearning website to house digital curriculum materials on five cross-country youth work themes that is open source, freely available and user-friendly. The project aims to meet the workforce development/continuing practice development needs of youth work practitioners (employed, voluntary and trainees/students) in diverse settings. The named project partners will work closely with designated Strategic Stakeholder Organisations [SSO} in each country [Estonian Youth Workers Association, Youth Action Northern Ireland, National Youth Council of Ireland, Victorian Youth Workers Association and the Finnish Kanuuna (Cannon) Network] to develop an open-access digital platform hosting high quality interactive and engaging, themed open educational resources (OER) of direct relevance to youth workers internationally. This will be achieved though: • The co-design of five core modules with cross-country input, relevance and access – each partner taking a lead on one module. • The creation of a set of open educational resources [OER] that are relevant, engaging, stimulating and challenging. • The sharing of expertise among partner countries to be incorporated into a unified digital resource. • The use of skilled Strategic Stakeholders to offer advice, pilot initial materials, offer feedback, support implementation and dissemination. • The building of a coherent network for dissemination and multiplier opportunities. The dissemination of digital materials across five partner countries and further afield through higher education and youth sector networks. YWeLP will create, design and host an eLearning website to house digital curriculum materials on five cross-country youth work themes (modules) that is open source, freely available and user-friendly. The thematic modules have been chosen to align with Erasmus + priorities in the field of youth and address continuing practice development (CPD) needs that resonate across European and global youth work contexts. They are: 1. Ethics and Human Rights in Professional Youth Work. [Codes of Ethics, Human Rights, professional association, reflective practice and supervision]. Lead Partner - Australia 2. Youth work in the Digital World [ICT in youth work, online and virtual youth work]. Lead Partner - Finland 3. Youth work in Contested and Diverse Spaces [multi-cultural and cross community youth work] Lead Partner - Northern Ireland 4. Youth Participation [Promoting participation and valuing informal and non-formal education in youth work] Lead Partner – Estonia 5. Communicating Youth Work – [writing for the profession, outcomes, evidence and impact, practitioner & collaborative. research] Lead Partner – Republic of Ireland Each module will be further divided into 5-8 sub-themes/units, the details of which will be finalised during the first partner meeting of 2017. The primary Intellectual Outputs of the YWeLP project will be: Open Educational Resources hosted on a high quality accessible website. The materials will include short videos related to each theme along with a well-designed downloadable pdf document of both the content and additional sources and resources. The YWeLP project is intended to have long term positive impacts on the partner organisations and their Strategic Stakeholders, the professionalisation of youth workers more broadly in order to ensure the provision of quality youth work services that meet the current and emerging needs of young people in diverse and complex contexts.
The Project The Youth Work eLearning Partnership [YWeLP], is an Erasmus+ funded KA2 strategic partnership across five countries (Ireland, Finland, Estonia, Northern Ireland and Australia) during the period 2017-19. The project is co-ordinated by the Centre for Youth Research and Development [CYRD] in the Department of Applied Social Studies, Maynooth University with partners in Humak University of Applied Sciences in Finland, Talllinn University in Estonia, Ulster University in Northern Ireland and Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. Each partner is supported by a youth work organisation in each country namely, the National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI), Youth Action Northern Ireland (YANI), the Estonian Youth Workers Association, the Victorian Youth Workers Association in Australia and the Kanuuna Network of directors of youth services in Finland.Each of the partner universities provides professional youth work education and training in their respective countries. As well as well as teaching and research each is connected into the wider youth work sector. YWeLP looked at that sector to support the development of the project, taking as its starting pint that youth work organisations and universities engaged in youth work education can support each other, can work together, can learn from each other to promote and sustain quality youth work to directly benefit young people. Context Youth work is in an international practice and while the issues facing young people will change, the contexts will change and our responses to those contexts will change, the principles on which youth work is based remain stable. These principles include the primacy of relationship and educational processes based on voluntary participation, working in ways that are enabling and empowering and promoting young people’s capacity for agency not just in their own but in those communities lives. YWeLP's final product is a website called Youthworkandyou.org which contributes to quality youth work by providing youth workers (voluntary, paid or students) with access to e-learning materials to promote their capacity to engage effectively with young people. As Carmel (in Module 1 Unit 3), says we need to empower youth workers in the same way that they empower young people – YWeLP's intent is that youth workers find engaging with this material an empowering experience which in turn has positive consequences for young people. The YWeLP team is committed to supporting a youth work ‘community of practice’ dedicated to the development of quality youth work globally. The Product YWeLP has created, designed and hosts youthworkandyou.org which provides digital curriculum materials on five contemporary youth work themes. Youth work is a dynamic field and there are many themes in contemporary youth work on which the team could have chosen to focus. In making its decisions YWeLP considered the practice and policy context of youth work across Europe and the wider world choosing to prioritise those most relevant right now: 1. Communicating Youth Work led by Maynooth University in collaboration with Tallinn University. 2. Youth Participation and Non-formal Learning in Youth Work led by Tallinn University in collaboration in with Victoria University 3. Ethics and Human Rights in Professional Youth Work led by Victoria University in collaboration with Ulster University. 4. Youth Work in Diverse Societies is led by Ulster University in collaboration with Humak University of Applied Sciences. 5. Youth Work in the Digital World led by Humak University of Applied Sciences in collaboration with Maynooth University. Each module consists of three units. Each unit consists of an interactive video (using H5P technology) along with downloadable material accessible from a variety of devices. All videos are subtitled in English. Each video is approximately five minutes if watched through without the interactivity and in the region of 20-30+ minutes with the interactivity. Both options are available on the website.While each video is informative in its own right, the interactive dimension invites participants to engage more deeply with the topic, to ‘watch, read, reflect and act.’ The downloadable resource in pdf format delves deeper again and provides additional information and resources on each unit’s topic. In this way, the module promote the practice of self-reflection in all learning activities. Time for reflection is important to integrate new knowledge and insights in any youth work work context and a core aspect of reflective practice. Participants are welcome to dip in and out, look at an individual video or check out a single pdf resource document in any order, at any time though learning is likely to be deeper if units are engaged with sequentially . Another aspect of what youthworkandyou.org does is act as a hub for curated resources to support practice - the intention is that the web site will continue to be relevant and updated.