TTL is a an acronym for “Teaching, Training, Learning”, and it describes our activities to experience the implementations of our good practice. The intention is to provide all our involved staff and freelancers further training and qualification for the improvement of our organisations and for the implementation of good practice in our own work.
We aim to share and compare our experience to develop our approaches to edu-larp, simulation and performative methods further, and to expand the target groups of our methods from their current use mainly in the field of pupils and young adults to transferring them into the work with professionals and adult learners and in social and life-long-learning contexts.
To achieve this objectives, educators and organisations need to experience the methods in practice. Therefore the personal try-out-experiences in the form of joint staff trainings and blended mobilities for online-tools is necessary and a welcome opportunity to expand our own horizons, meet other professionals and engage in holistic education methods. TTL are bound to vaster locations on the countryside, as our methods require at least 20-30 participants plus space to move, spread out, build stations and act things out.
teaching, training, learning
Each partner organisation assigns an experienced facilitators team for preparation and implementation of at least one TTL-activity day to offer peer training. Additional staff and freelancers from each of our organisation are selected as participants to attend the TTL-activities.
Getting to know new methods as well as understanding their different stages (preparation, game play, de-briefing) and pedagogical intentions are our main goals, so each partner organisation is able to decide if and how it will use these methods in the future, and how to add them to their curricula and their educational and social work. This also helps to raise awareness, sensitize, empower and teach the whole participating staff about the topics and backgrounds of the applied methods. With this common experience the impact effect the whole organisations.
Transfer of learning happens by additional staff and freelancers further discussing their experience with their project partner organisation in the weeks after TTL activity. They give detailed professional feedback in this end-evaluation. In this way, the introduced tools get reevaluated, which provides a basis for further improvement to the contributing organisation.
Beside that additional staff and freelancers will evaluate their local opportunities to apply the experienced approaches within their own target-groups, and eventually prepare an implementation plan/proposal for their organisations.
differences are resources
The transnational exchange between us as partner organisations is highly essential to increase the learning opportunities overall. Our different cultural backgrounds on learning result in different approaches of larping. In North European countries e.g. larps are already used widely in education, while they are not very known for that purpose in other parts of Europe.
Furthermore, the level of digitalisation of education varies considerably between European countries. Therefore transnational knowledge and experience exchange are very important at this point in time.
The topics inclusion-exclusion, diversity and discrimination are especially well to address by experience-based learning approaches. Many educational institutions, esp. in non-formal education, are aware of this advantage and consider these approaches as a chance in the actual social and political situation in a lot of European societies. Polarized and stereotyped society discourses forced by populist political movements and the natural defence-psychology of people against accusations make authentic experience necessary. Edu-larp provides this space for experience. Edu-larp holds the advantage that it can be used with target groups of all sectors and milieus, and that it can be applied in digital and non-digital formats. From a leisure pursuit to a special event in school or university education there is a big variety of possible implementation backgrounds.
Awareness raising of social-workers and educational staff of the partner-organisations
All three TTL-Implementation-activities focusing on edu-larp, Simulation and performative methods will provide experience and learning opportunities for all involved.
We aim for participants gaining more background knowledge on new non-formal educational methods that are related to role-play, performance and simulation techniques, extending their teaching skills and knowledge on facilitation methods especially in edu-larp and Simulation approaches, getting deeper knowledge about topics related to discrimination, bias and prejudice, stereotypes and empowerment. We further intend to evoke empathy and raise awareness for people facing discriminatory situations and structures as well as prejudice and stereotyping.
We partner organisations hope to encourage ourselves as well as our staff and freelancers who act as participants to reflect on own stereotypes and prejudices and think about privileges we hold. We wish to enhance awareness and as a follow-up strengthen the motivation to work for more inclusive working structures for underprivileged groups.
Extending transnational and inter-sectoral cooperation
Another aim of the TTL is to motivate all involved to extend their transnational and inter-sectoral cooperation, to join further cooperation with the partnership organisations and get to know new partner organisations for further cooperation. In a nutshell: Encourage dialogue, networking and good practice exchange on local, regional, national and European level.