The Pathway to Competences reached Náměšť nad Oslavou
Work, competences, but also fun. That all was brought by the third international meeting within the project “Cooperation for Social and Civic Competences’ Innovative Education”, which took place from 6th to 11th March 2017. Participants from the Czech Republic, Poland and Lithuania went this time to Náměšť nad Oslavou and it was the Czech team, which took the responsibility of organisation on its shoulders.
It is Monday afternoon and the premises of the former factory start to liven up. The place no longer serves the production of carpets; instead it hosts a newly built Centre of Environmental Techniques and Technologies (CETT), which will be used in the coming week by thirty participants of the international project about civic and social competences. Once our ten-person Czech team, which is for the first time in the position of organisers, gathers in place, it is time for preparation to start. Our partners from abroad arrive shortly and we head to a cosy café Caffe Zappé, where a rich and tasty welcome dinner awaits us.
We wake up into a beautiful March morning with a lot of energy. It will be needed as the programme is very full! We share our expectations with the others; we evaluate the experimental phase and mutually present the methods, which we had the opportunity to test since the previous meeting in Lithuania. We go back to a deeper understanding of civic and social competences, too, which is beneficial especially for those, who joined the project at a later stage.
The evening brings us an activity or more precisely activities that are not typical. Some of us have prepared short, twenty-minute workshops, during which we can share our interests with the others, learn something new and have fun. Surprisingly, we have really diverse areas of interests – from singing, through fencing to physical and chemical experiments.
In the middle of the week we focus on us, the participants, as facilitators. Today and also on Friday, we will go through three workshops, which will take three different aspects into account: the place, the group and the facilitator as such. For some of us this is a completely new area that is why we have maximum concentration. Apart from that we are also starting to write the publication, which will serve as on output of this project and will be of use especially for youth workers in developing competences of the young people they work with.
The fourth day starts exceptionally early. We change the environment and go admiring the beauty of Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic. Fist we continue creating the publication in a pleasant tea room; afterwards we move to the Brno observatory, which leaves us absolutely amazed. The place gives us a very creative impression, so the writing is done almost by itself. In the afternoon there is even some time left for enjoying the beauties of Brno.
The end of the week is nearing. We follow up with the morning part to Wednesday and run through the last two workshops. And in the afternoon we add another hour and half of creating the publication. It is only the first draft, and only one chapter of it, but still we feel that we did some good work.
During the meeting in Poland we came up with the idea of an application with methods of civic and social competences education, which now starts to get a more concrete form. We are visited by the programmer Honza, who shows us the first design proposals and discusses with us the functions as well as the content. It seems that we have something to look forward to.
It is not easy to wake up after the excellent last evening, but there are still some things to be finished, most importantly to evaluate everything. This time we came up with a unique form – painting with “earth” colours, which are obtained for the soil itself.
After a creative morning there is not much time together left and we say our goodbyes in the afternoon. We still have some six more months of work ahead of us – to finish the publication and spread the project’s outputs, but all that only in the national teams. A couple of last words and smiles and we are going back to our countries, cities and homes…