Seminar 4th of april: Non formal education

On 4th and 5th of april we developed the seminar: Get involved! about non formal education and EVS. 

We planned the seminar for two days:

-Non formal education day: 

 Open a space to talk and debate about non formal education and its tools and methods.

-EVS experience:
 Intercultural exchange, youth in action programme and EVS projects.

First part of the first day was carried out by Yoana and Miriam. They presented education and its divisions in formal, informal and non formal education. To open the seminar we played a presentation game:

Miriam and Yoana did an entertaining presentation and to check our knowledge about non formal education they divided us in 2 groups for a competition. Every group had to explote balloons with the ass! and find the paper inside of them. The paper had written an activity that we had to place in a big poster divided in formal, informal or non formal education.

After a break to eat tasty pizza from La Costa Restaurant, Daniel and me started our part of this first day of the seminar: tools and methods of non formal education.

We talked about learning as a process, different kinds of learning and the effectivity of learning by experience. We also talked about our brain and the big difference between the use and stimulation of left and right sides of our brains in formal education. To emphasize that learning is an  unlimited and endless process we elaborated a dynamic: people was divided in 2 groups to answer 2 different questions: how many continents has the world? and what means "art"?

We opened a space to debate how were these questions.  "What means art?" was clearly an open question but apparently "How many continents has the world?" was a closed question with only one possible answer. Everyone wrote "5" but Daniel who wrote "7". In fact there are different answers from 4 to 7 continents according to different models(i.e sometimes Antarctica is included and sometimes is not). In Spain and Romania you will study "5" as the only answer and in Germany and China you will study 7. 

What we want to show with this dynamic is that every question is an open question with more than one possible answer, even with more questions related. We have to be curious, open and flexible to question and re-question everything everytime!!!!

After some energizers to move our body and to be focused again, we started to talk about 3 big tools that non formal education use:

GAMES, SPORTS, ARTS

And like learn by experience is the best way to learn we played some games, we drew in couples and we played football with a balloon:

 

To close the first day of the seminar we distributed green post-its with leaf forms to fill our tree of knowledge with the things we learned in this day. 

You can see here the tree before and after the seminar:

Al :)