Inter vs Intra | Youth Exchange

Dates: 01-09 November 2017

Venue: Trakai, Lithuania

Organizer NGO: Innoved Lietuva

Project Description

Nowadays a lot of young people feel a lack of real life experience when they graduate from high schools or start their studies in universities. One of the reasons to that is that formal education frequently fails to deliver sills that are important for employment. Usually, formal education does not prepare you for an adult life, it doesn’t focus on teaching how to interact with other people, ho to be a team player, how to prepare for and pass your first job interview and surely it doesn’t explain why it is important to be aware of young strong and weak sides. So when youngsters start their life path it can be very difficult to get through without any loss. What if we could escape that by giving a valuable experience on time?

Through having special exercises on the topic of intrapersonal intelligence, participants found out their own preferred learning opportunities and how to organize it, get healthy habit of evaluating their own work and making self-analysis, work understanding on their own passion and reasons behind it, develop empathy toward others, learn how to motivate and control themselves and become aware of their weak and strong sides. They also learned to understand and analyze their own feelings, emotions, and background of those. In this way, this project gave opportunity to learn and improve intrapersonal life skills such as self-awareness, self-control, self-esteem, self-respect, and self-reflection.

Through another part of the programme that focused on interpersonal intelligence. Participants learned how to be and why it is important to be a team player, how to interact with others, how to solve conflicts on the first stage, how to identify healthy relationship, how to build a solid partnership, how to defend their own opinion in a structured way and how to develop leadership skills. That way they all developed their interpersonal skills such as effective communication, cooperation, teamwork and problem solving abilities, respect of similarities, appreciation, empathy, trust, and love.

The general methodological framework of the project was based on non-formal education principles taking into account needs, motivations and experience of target group using participatory learning approach. Diverse methods like working in pairs and small groups, team building activities, debates and theatre are used. Various workshops were organized on the topics of conflict management, public speech and body language, self-control and self-motivation, relationship with yourself and others. The working structure gave the opportunity to have space to fully participate, exchange experiences, share knowledge and demonstrate your own skills.

The project gathered 5 youngsters from each of the following countries;  Lithuania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Italy, Macedonia, Portugal, Spain and Turkey.

You can find the after movie of the project prepared by participants in the link: