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Presence Dealers

2020-2-PT02-KA105-0071702020Youth mobilityfinalized
Countries: PT|RO|CZ|SK|IT|LV|EL · Grant: €24,350
Creativity and cultureNew innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training coursesHealth and wellbeing

Objectives

Based on our experience with TC "Reconnectin" - that happened in March 2020 -, which was one of the trainings that were overtaken by the start of worldwide pandemic of COVID-19 — having therefore forced us to interrupt the activities in the middle of the course and find ways to safely transport participants back to their homes —, multiple conversations came up with the same underlying message: participants expressed their fear not of the virus itself, but of people not being able to maintain a responsible and calm attitude in this challenging situation. This realization strengthened our motivation and effort even more to further explore the topic of mindfulness and develop tools and methods. Before the interruption of the training, participants reflected in day to day reflections, on methods used and identified mindful movement based exercises as the most powerful, impactful, easiest to implement and most needed for their work and activities where they feel lack of movement and understanding how important role it plays in learning process and performance. They expressed their will to continue exploring this topic and co-create the follow-up of this project focused more on mindful movement based methods as they believe and had direct experience themselves, their colleagues and organization could greatly profit from learning how to implement more mindfulness and movement into their work and as well personal lives. Strong evidence from imaging sources, anatomical studies, and clinical data support this insight/ experiment and indeed show the connection between movement and learning, along with its benefits. Movement can be an effective cognitive strategy to strengthen learning, improve memory and retrieval, and enhance learner motivation, overall wellbeing, and morale. (1) Additionally, many educators have found that programs which include movement do help learners with special needs. Many special-needs learners are stuck in counterproductive mental states, and movement is a quick way to change them. Whereby modern, the seated lifestyle and lack of movement is linked to health risks. (2) Mindfulness and its significant benefits have been proven by centuries and lately by numerous of researches (3) and have been implemented in leading companies in innovation e.g. Google and significant institutions e.g. European Commission. (4) Our efforts have been initiated by the European researches expressing the concern at the prevalence of mental health issues, which fused into the main goals of the KA1 “MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLBEING”. Presence Dealers learning with movement and mindfulness helped us to reach full learning potential again. We designed a training with a greater focus on mindful movement, involving the feedback and insights from participants, based on the need of young people (our target group and youth workers themselves) to find ways to skillfully implement more mindfulness and movement into our activities and daily lives. In this project, we worked towards achieving some objectives which are further described in the topic 3., referring to “Description of the Project”, in this report. Our project aimed to link its objectives and its activities to the objectives and priorities of the Erasmus+ program (and this specific key action) in the following way: • Project and its activities were designed to improve key competencies of participants and to give them space to use it directly in a practical way, by working on the project outcomes, follow up and public events. • Improving competencies to help participants to be more active in their communities and in the field of employment or realizing their own initiatives and projects, therefore they could become powerful and independent actors in building up their future. • The project involving young people from different backgrounds, including people with fewer opportunities. • Project activities involving aspects and helping to develop awareness of social inclusion, healthy lifestyle and wellbeing, ICT skills, information about EU learning and mobility opportunities, active participation, learning mobility, and intercultural dialogue. This project represented a great opportunity for youth workers and organizers to develop their skills, to improve policy decisions within their organization and other associated subjects regarding their impact on young people. Furthermore, we aimed to help upgrade the involved organizations to improve their capacity and cooperation in implementing intercultural events. We wanted to encourage participants and leaders to create follow-up activities, future projects, good practices, and outcomes to share with other organizations and target groups. (1) http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/104013/chapters/Movement-and-Learning.aspx (2) https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/expert-answers/sitting/faq-20058005 (3)https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-it/201309/20-scientific-reasons-start-meditating-today (4) https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/mindfull-or-mind-full

Project partners (7)