Within the main objective of improving the skills and competences of adult educators, we have set ourselves 4 specific goals - all in relation to the VUCA world and its challenges. As a partnership we aimed to (1) collect and test best practices for introducing Polyvagal Theory into learning situations to create safe learning environments online and offline. And to (2) create and test new training materials for burnout prevention and resilience building. We also aimed to (3) increase our competitiveness and visibility in the training field and to strengthen our networking capacities. We wanted to share best practice with and provide hands-on learning opportunities to our junior trainers, (4) as a capacity-building activity and to lay the foundations for a forward-looking Central European training centre. With regard to our direct target group we designed our project to provide a large number of contact hours and individual mentoring so that real personal development and integration of skills and competences could take place. We actively provided our participants with various opportunities to develop their own unique style and approach to resilience building and nervous system friendly tools.
It is fair to say that adult education practitioners are becoming increasingly aware of the potential of the body-mind-heart unit and the power of movement. There is a vast array of tools and practices already on the market, most of which pose the same kind of challenges:Or they remain at the level of action,promising various quick fixes but leaving fundamental behaviours intact, thus being energy consuming and not sustainable in the long run.Or, if they offer a more comprehensive approach, they are hardly affordable for the average educator (for reasons of time or money) From our point of view this situation is most acute in relation to (1) burn-out/resilience and (2) virtual transformation. Resilience has been a hot topic for the last 5-8 years,but very little has happened at a practical level. Also, online platforms have changed the face of education in recent years, while neuroscience has made great strides in revealing the importance and prerequisites of safe human connection, summarized under the theme of Polyvagal Theory.We applied for this project in order to find our own answers in these 2 fields to the growing need for continuous professional development and personal renewal, and to strengthen our organisational capacity