TC “Mind-Drawing!”
Our team of three spent time in Wilga, Poland, to participate in a training course about graphic facilitation organized by YoWo Poland.
The term ‘graphic facilitation’ might be unfamiliar to most, so it seems fitting to start off by explaining it a bit. In simple terms, it is a tool for putting ideas into visual forms to make them more easily understandable. It’s something everybody has experience with, but few people know how to do it in a well-constructed way. Although it could be put to use in different areas of life, we mostly concentrated on the field of youth work and teaching.
Firstly, we learned that there are no artistic skills needed to practice graphic facilitation. It takes a lot of practice and determination to perfect your GF skills, but it is something that anyone could use. And during that week we had a lot of time to practice and find our own style of facilitating.
In addition to practicing our drawing skills, we spent quite a lot of time learning how to create clear visuals for different target groups, taking into account different demographics and cultural backgrounds that influence the way that people understand visual material. This is also a reason why it was good to practice GF in this multicultural group of people, because we gained so much insight from getting the feedback from people from diverse backgrounds.
All these theories, methods and templates were useful when creating our own small individual sessions, where we could put our skills to test in a simulated learning space. We had to come up with a 10 minute lesson about a topic we know well and use visuals to illustrate our ideas. Another way we practiced our skills was graphic recording, which combines all of the graphic facilitation principles to record someone else’s live presentation. We practiced recording conversations in a group and also recording someone else’s speech.
We also learned how to use graphics in digital media, creating short films and GIFs, because it might be the best way of reaching young audiences and although youngsters (us included) use social media often, not many know how to use it effectively and create original content that could bring some kind of educational value to the users. One of the most memorable moments from the project was the movie night, when we watched all of the films we created. It was clear that it had become a great space for co-creation and.
Apart from the topic of the project, we of course spent a lot of free time together, getting to know each other while discovering the city of Warsaw, enjoying Polish culture and cuisine, playing board games and having volleyball tournaments.
As always, it was the first project for some people in the group, and it was great to also talk more in detail about Erasmus+ opportunities and share each others’ experiences. As it turned out, even the experienced project-goers had something new to learn about the structure of European youth work institutions. That is something that our partner YoWo puts a lot of emphasis on – creating this network of young people and youth workers who are aware of these European opportunities and are motivated to create their own enterprises for making advances in their local communities. Hopefully these personal connections created during this training will lead to some new initiatives in the future!
- Kirke, Iti and Markus
