CONTEXT COOBA addresses the needs of youngsters with low level of education, possibly with migrant/minority background, facing school failure, fewer employment opportunities, and often suffering from discrimination. This complex conjunction of disadvantages and social stigmata can lead youngster to be socially excluded, and marginalized in the labor market. James Heckman (Nobel Prize 2000; Economics) accounts that there is a direct correlation between soft skills and personal and/or professional achievement. Thus, our project has the ambition to enhance soft skills competences to foster these youngsters’ empowerment, social and cultural inclusion. OBJECTIVES 1- designing a new methodology combining a, art and cultural mediation and b, bodily expression activities for soft skills learning 2- conceiving physical activities to explore artworks empirically and to use bodily expression to improve disadvantaged youngsters’ soft skills (communication, cooperation and conflict management) 3- using elements of the European cultural heritage to connect people 4- launching and pursuing collaboration among facilitators, teachers and other professionals working with youngsters, around COOBA soft skills learning activities. 5- organizing a multilateral, non hierarchical workshop where youngsters, decision makers and employers interact with each other and co-create a corporate artwork 6- developing a new scientific assessment tool to measure and compare objectively the methods and the soft skills development targeted in COOBA. NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTS AND IMPACTS Disadvantaged youngsters, possibly with migrant or minority background, suffering from discrimination, school failure and low-qualification will constitute our primary target group. During the project we will recruit at least 60 youngsters, to participate in our activities and improve their soft skills. The secondary target group is constituted by professionals working with youngsters and who are potentially interested in how to develop soft skills through cultural mediation and bodily expression activities. During the project we will contact at least 120 facilitators, and organize to them trainings to share our combined methodology and the use of video analysis to assess soft skills learning. We will reach about 15 policy and decision makers, employers inviting them to participate in a special workshop with youngsters. They will have the occasion to test the relevance of our methodology and potentially to reuse it in another context with youngsters or with another public. This workshop has an important impact as it allows to organize cooperative collaborations between individuals who usually never meet in a non hierarchical setting (i.e. disadvantaged youngsters and employers). The dissemination actions we will undertake will reach about 5000 professionals within the education/cultural sector, showing how to embed soft skills learning within cultural and art mediation and body expression. DESCRIPTION OF METHODOLOGY TO BE USED IN CARRYING OUT THE PROJECT COOBA is based on the combination of various pedagogical approaches: cooperative, action-based and non formal learnings, adapted to the fields of art mediation, cultural mediation and body expression in order to build an innovative program of soft skills learning, (communication, cooperation and conflict management skills). The hypothesis is that activities connected to art, cultural mediation and to body expression are especially relevant for non formal learning of soft skills. Such activities create situations in which participants can use and develop their abilities to communicate, cooperate and to deal with conflicts. Furthermore, they can enhance creativity, from both the cognitive and embodied perspectives. Soft skills’ learning combined to the exploration of the European cultural heritage helps to enhance the youngsters’ social and cultural integration. POTENTIAL LONG TERM BENEFITS DADAU and MFAB will continue to apply the methodology of soft skills learning through art mediation and body expression within their own programs, pursuing their goals of fostering disadvantaged youngsters’ empowerment. They will possibly apply this methodology to other disadvantaged groups (e.g. adults), using the assessment tool for adapting their pedagogical activities to other types of public interested in soft skills improvement. Further collaborations could also be built around the COOBA methodology with other educational and cultural institutions for pursuing the development of empowering various types of publics. With COOBA, LiU opens a new research field in soft skills understanding and assessment, namely the interactional and multimodal approach of soft skills, the video-analysis affording new indicators, largely absent of today’s research. LiU could become a leader in the research field of video based description and assessment of soft skills with pedagogical applied impacts.
CONTEXT The COOBA project is based on the diagnosis that many young people need to develop their soft skills to enhance their employability. In the course of the project, we found that this diagnosis was also relevant for young people following vocational courses, for example in the field of personal care. The training courses that these young people follow are focused on hard skills. However, for these same young people, low levels of soft skills can delay their learning (in which group work is an important component) or cause them to lose employment opportunities. For newcomers or ethnic minorities, the development of soft skills is synonymous with socio-professional opportunities. For professionals and volunteers working with these groups, there is also a need for innovative methods to facilitate informal learning and interactive soft skills development activities. OBJECTIVES The COOBA project aims to develop soft-skills development tools for young people with low qualifications or in training, as well as for the professionals and volunteers who supervise them. The objective is to propose attractive and efficient pedagogical tools, hence the choice to develop an informal approach based on art and interactivity. NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS During the development of the project across the three partners, we directly involved around 300 people, either to test our products or to present them and discuss their applicability. PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTS Two broad categories of participants can be distinguished. On the one hand, the public of young people in a situation of social and/or educational insecurity, and on the other hand the professionals and volunteers who work or are working in the training of these young people. Among the first group, we mobilised young Roma in Hungary, migrants in Sweden. In France, we have been in contact with young people in vocational training as well as with psychotic young people. The second group of participants is made up of arts professionals and volunteers working in museums or cultural institutions with young migrants or young people from ethnic minorities. It also includes specialised educators working with psychotic young people in a day hospital, trainers teaching young people in training in associations, and volunteers dealing with young people in sports associations. UNDERTAKEN ACTIVITIES At each stage of the project we have involved either young people or professionals working with young people. This public tested the activities and gave us feedback so that we could adjust the pedagogical tools. The first stage of the project consisted in elaborating a state of the art of research on the interactional aspects of three soft skills: communication, collaboration and conflict management. The aim is to provide the various professionals mentioned above with resources to train themselves on how to develop young people's soft skills by generating linguistic and physical interaction around works of art. The second stage of the project was to develop a set of activities for young people in the different categories mentioned above. The main characteristic of these activities is to allow young people to improve their soft skills in social interaction around artworks that they interpret in a collaborative way. These activities are adaptable to a wide variety of profiles and institutions. We have also developed a detailed activity plan to work specifically on team building within a group and video tutorials for professionals to present the COOBA method. The fifth stage of the project consisted in developing a tool for the elaboration of soft skills in social interaction. This tool is intended for professionals who wish to qualitatively evaluate their teaching practices. This tool can also be used with young people in the context of training on communication skills. RESULTS / IMPACT We were able to experiment and demonstrate the value of using artworks as resources for developing young people’s soft skills. We produced and made available four manuals that cover this area, and a series of videos. The first manual provides trainers with a theoretical basis for understanding the relationship between social interaction and soft skills development, and the value of cultural mediation in these pedagogical activities. Two other manuals propose activities targeting a wide variety of skills such as argumentation or multimodal communication. A set of didactic videos reinforces the accessibility of these resources for professionals. Finally, a reflexive evaluation tool enables professionals to ensure the quality of their practice in the long term. LONGER-TERM BENEFITS For the project partners, these pedagogical tools will continue to be used in their professional practices in the coming years, either with the same audiences or with other audiences. The implementation of COOBA was also an opportunity to establish partnerships with organisations involved in various stages of the project.