The level of human-made global environmental change is on the verge of causing irreversible and intolerable damages to our Earth system, which could deeply impact the structure and identity of our societies and undermine existential conditions of future generations. On one hand we face the strong pressure of staying within the planetary boundaries, on the other hand, refugee crisis and the fearsome nationalist movements hit us almost like extreme weather events. Trends of exclusion in the EU, processes of de-solidarization need to be offset to build sufficient social empowerment to shape processes which can lead us to staying within the planetary boundaries and create resilience throughout the EU. To answer these challenges, the project will produce a Travel Guide on Transformation which will tell stories in transmedia – this means in different formats, adequate to the message of the story. The stories can be humoristic, sad, shocking, motivating – they will be a mix of advertising, documentaries, internet and radio formats, interviews, etc and will build up the big travel guide where the users can intuitively move within the countries to read how transformation takes place, to get motivated and to act. The Transmedia travel guide will be the core output of the project and its capacity building.The overall objective of the project therefore is to contribute to overcoming the barriers which currently stand in the way of the transformation needed to tackle the present fundamental social-ecological challenges by building capacities for transformative literacy and transformative competences to be passed on to the younger generations. The youth workers and young participants will understand, reflect and communicate the importance of their role in shaping local, regional and global transformation towards more respectful relationships with nature and humankind. They will also equip themselves to take up responsibility for national and European policy making and strategy building and for showing opportunities to take up citizenship towards participatory and inclusive action for transformation. For this a methodology for youth workers and young promoters will be developed. They will practically do a three-step e-learning and encounter-based capacity building. In doing so, the young participants will create the highly dynamic Transmedia “Travel Guide on Transformation”. Two major face-to-face encounters will take place, in which youth workers, peer-leaders and members of the partner organisations plan, realize and undergo the capacity building together with additional participants and experts from the hosting countries. After these a strong focus is on virtual dissemination and three national workshops to capitalize on the experience. The project clearly aims at becoming a catalyst for going beyond traditional methods of capacity building and the production of OER and wants to become a flagship for innovate youth work and social innovation.
The level of human-made global environmental change is on the verge of causing irreversible and intolerable damages to our Earth system, which will most probably deeply impact the structure and identity of our societies and undermine existential conditions of future generations.Travel Transformation tried to find responses to these challenges. The project did so by creating a transmedia travel guide on transformation. The guide consists of audio visual stories, interlinked with blog articles and other formats, amongst others, interactive learning videos and bricolages. The project took up the challenge of creating stories of transformation rather than pointing fingers on better behaviour and unsustainable action. That way, the public can enter the page and intuitively look for the format and content one is interested in or wanting to learn more about. This central output of the project will remain open for further contributions on a long-term basis and is to be found at: https://traveltransformation.kmgne.de Also, the e-learning modules, which where the knowledge and learning base for the participants will remain accessible beyond project duration.According to the above, the overall objective of the project was to contribute to overcoming the barriers which currently stand in the way of the transformation needed to tackle the present fundamental social-ecological challenges by building capacities for transformative literacy and transformative competences to be passed on to the younger generations. All participants have indeed understood and reflected on new narrations and stories which they created, and through which they empowered themselves especially with regard to their role in shaping local, regional, intercultural and global transformation towards more respectful relationships between nature and humankind and between humans on very local but also on international and intercultural scale. In order to reach this objective and to also foster European citizenship with regard to these issues, a blended-learning methodology has been developed by the project partners and backed up by external expertise, mainly for topic-specific inputs, professional media production and intercultural and sustainability related tutoring. This blended learning initially and during the two rounds of capacity building included a three-step process: e-learning before and after the international encounters. However, throughout the project, the e-learning space has become an open space for learning, not only in a linear but very self-oriented and self-directed way – open for participants from the partner countries and beyond the capacity buildings and mobility activities and also open for those participating in national workshops or the general public of the travel guide for transformation. Of course, the two big face-to-face encounters in Germany and Chile with the intensive capacity building, field-trips and the parallel mobility activities caused major dynamics, emotions, learnings, and motivation to keep on working on the project’s issues. This energy has especially shown in the second encounter / capacity building and mobility to Chile after the experience made in Germany. Also very visible, the empowerment of the participating youth workers and youths when organising and realising of three final national workshops in order to pass on competences and lessons learnt to peers. As initially planned, we would resume that the project has indeed managed to become a catalyst for the participating youths, but also for experts, partner organisation and further peers – a catalyst for going beyond traditional methods of capacity building and the production of OER (e-learning platform, modules, videos, song, blog articles and interactive videos on traveltransformation.kmgne.de), and for innovate youth work and social innovation.