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Circus Pedagogy for Youthwork

2020-3-LV02-KA105-0035192020Youth mobilityfinalized
Countries: LV|MK|HU|FR|PL|CY · Grant: €16,101
Inclusion - equityYouth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy)Creativity and culture

Objectives

Why circus? Today pedagogy is exploring new non-standard forms of teaching to facilitate the education of young people, especially young people with fewer opportunities and/or disabilities. Youthworkers must find new interactive and engaging teaching methods so that young people in the growing flow of information can choose the most socially significant and valuable activities for self-development and social inclusion. Nowadays, the development of human knowledge and awareness in all fields has caused traditional teaching and learning methods to lose their efficacy, so in order to keep pace with the changing world, we should look for new ways to increase and transfer knowledge to young people. At the same time in many Europe countries there lack of initiative and creativity among young people, negative thinking about learning, lack of solution finding methods and fear of thinking "out of box". These problems hinder personal growth of young people, don’t let them to see their strong sides. The main idea of circus pedagogy is that circus is accessible to everybody regardless of their age, physical condition, gender. We consider that circus activities are constructive leisure activities combining physical activity with creativity and art. By practicing this activity, children and teenager develop physical skills, social skills and personal skills. We wanted to propose appealing activities to youngsters in the form of circus pedagogy workshops. Apart from being attractive to young people, these activities convey modern values of citizenship, honesty and cooperation and at the same time build personal self-esteem and trust. We wanted to educate people involved in the youth field (youth workers) such as school teachers, sport teachers and youth center leaders from all over Europe and provide them with an innovative and flexible methods of youthwork. We wanted to show them how to create, organize and implement circus workshop with kids and teenagers. There were no any circus experience needed, because a TC was prepared for total beginners. We presented circus activity as an efficient form of pedagogy in teaching and non-formal education. Our main idea is that circus activity is appealing and fun for everybody, making it ideal as a tool for non-formal educational work with youngsters. The aim of the project was to introduce to youth workers with positive, healthy activities, encourage co-operation, and strengthen their confidence, while developing co-ordination and persistence - new attractive methods which can be used in their future work with youngsters. Certain circus activities like juggling, acrobalance, diabolo etc. are taught, as well as time management for youth trainers, basic of training skills for youth workers, leadership, body language of trainer, secrets of the group dynamics. The end result is much more than just learning these skills for future youthwork – it also helps to improve self-esteem of participants, their social capital and directs them towards positive ways of living, helps to improve coordination, concentration on the activity and responsibility for their actions, either individual and in team.

Project partners (6)