Coaches and youth workers are struggling to create situations in which adolescents can learn life lessons that can be transferred off the football pitch. Moreover, combining the struggles of running a training, with work and personal life leaves little time to develop such a curriculum and program. For this reason, this partnership will combine the power of football, academic insights and evidenced-based pedagogical methodologies to establish professionalization activities for youth workers. This Strategic Partnership does so by bringing together knowledge partners and practitioners in the field of youth work, uniting both practice and science to promote the socio-educational and personal development of youth. The youth workers that participate in the FAIR-PLAY project will work on the notions of “resiliency” and “life-skills transfers” amongst youth. Resiliency is understood as a manner in which one reacts to their environment; specifically in the face of adverse circumstances. The life-skills transfer concerns the utilization of practical skills learned in a certain setting, in another settings. For sport participation, this means employing the lessons learned on the football pitch in other aspects of one’s life. In order to achieve these goals, work-based learning will be combined with inquiry-based learning. Multinational work sessions will be organized in which professors and youth workers will work on current problems stemming from the actual say-to-day practices of the clubs. Subsequently, each club will engage in small-scale research projects to gauge the effectiveness of these new training materials. In total, 9 Intellectual Outputs will be developed and 5 Learning, Teaching, Training Activities (LTTAs) will be organized during this project. During these LTTAs, 4 youth workers from each participating club will be present. The FAIR-PLAY project will enable youth workers to develop, supported by the academic staff, specific activities to be implemented in their own club social program. This project will thus result in new additions to the Resiliency and Life-Skills Curriculum. Moreover, participating youth workers will be trained and professionalized further, within a network that enables them to learn from each other’s practices.
The main objective of the FAIR-PLAY consortium was to enable youth coaches to adequately provide their pupils with resiliency and life-skills to help them on and off the pitch. In order to do so, the youth coaches needed to be provided with adequate training and tools. In this project, the close involvement of the youth coaching was of great importance to ensure that the results perfectly address the needs of the coaches, are of high quality (best practices) and are easy to use in practice. The youth workers who participated in the FAIR-PLAY project worked on the notions of “resiliency” and “life-skills transfers” amongst youth. Resiliency is understood as a manner in which one reacts to their environment; specifically in the face of adverse circumstances. The life-skills transfer concerns the utilization of practical skills learned in a certain setting, in another settings. For sport participation, this means employing the lessons learned on the football pitch in other aspects of one’s life.
Coaches and youth workers are struggling to create situations in which adolescents can learn life lessons that can be transferred off the football pitch. Moreover, combining the struggles of running a training, with work and personal life leaves little time to develop such a curriculum and program. For this reason, this partnership combined the power of football, academic insights and evidenced-based pedagogical methodologies to establish professionalization activities for youth workers. This Strategic Partnership did so by bringing together knowledge partners and practitioners in the field of youth work, uniting both practice and science to promote the socio-educational and personal development of youth.