Yesterday I had the amazing opportunity to implement a training on Global Education. I switched my role from EuGen intern to facilitator and implemented three of the activities included in Youth of the World project toolkit. We created three very interesting reflection moments on key global education subjects such interdependence, stereotypes and human rights.
During our first activity, we saw how elements and people around the world can be deeply connected. This creates a complex web of interdependence from a social, economic, environmental and political point of view. We symbolically recreated this web using a long string and reflected on what could damage this web or what was missing. This helped us to understand how those complex links work and to identify what could be the events or phenomena influencing the web, even in multiple directions.
The second activity was about stereotypes. Its aim was to develop empathy towards those categories affected by societal prejudices. We focused on three particular characters usually targeted by stereotypes: a girl from the LGBT community, a boy from the Roma community and an asylum seeker. We tried to step in their shoes and recreated a moment in which every participant pretended to be one of them and experienced common stereotypes on them. This led us to a meaningful reflection about empathy, about understanding these categories feelings and therefore how to have some impact in the long process of overcoming stereotypes.
The last activity was about human rights awareness. Two teams were given two cases of human rights violations which they had to identify and present to the rest of the group. The debriefing of the activity gave us the opportunity to have a discussion about human rights awareness and the actual level of respect for basic human rights in different countries.
Stay tuned for the next developments of the project :)
We are thankful to our good partners from Hotel Forum Sofia for hosting our training.