Critical Thinking Workshop

Project Reference:

2021-1-PL01-KA220-YOU-000028758

Start for DC is a 24-month innovative project that aims to encourage the dual career of young athletes of high school age (14 to 19 years old) by fostering collaboration among six partner organizations.

Background

Youth workers need support and new tools to be able to deal with the uncritical opinions of young people, with their radical claims and attitudes, with their conspiracy theories (also regarding the existence of the COVID-19 virus) and with their unconscious repetition of populist and false information drawn mainly from from the Internet.

The aim of our project is to equip youth workers with innovative tools – an e-learning course in critical thinking and scenarios of workshops for young people – which will increase the quality of their work with young people and will be able to better support young people in dealing with populist content, hate, fake news and hate speech. Youth work and youth work has taken various forms over the last year and has highlighted many shortcomings in the preparation of youth workers for work.

Objectives

Thanks to the project, young people who are the main beneficiaries of the project will receive support from youth workers in the field of conscious handling, processing, recognizing and reading information such as hate, fake news, populist and radical content, and the ability to distinguish between facts and opinions. This will protect it from radicalization and disinformation present in the mass media, especially on the Internet. Thus, the social awareness of young people and their civic attitude towards disinformation and radicalism will increase.

Additionally, the qualifications of youth workers in the field of critical thinking will be raised, which will significantly improve the quality of their work.

In addition, thanks to the project, a forum for the exchange of information between partners on new threats to young people as a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic will be created. Partners implementing this project will have the opportunity to discuss future cooperation in supporting youth affected by the pandemic.

Activities

The project includes 3 key international project meetings to achieve the goals and results.

In addition, as part of the implementation of the results, one project meeting for youth workers was planned to test the e-learning platform tool developed during the project.

Training for youth and youth workers will contribute to the training of the first group of leaders who will further multiply the acquired knowledge among young people and teach other youth workers to use the new innovative tool.

Scheduled training workshops for young people led by youth workers who have previously tested the e-learning course according to scenarios created for this purpose will allow to test and refine the methods of working with young people on the international level, which is also one of the assumptions of the project.

As part of the project, we have also planned national webinars to reach more youth workers in all countries participating in the project.

Impact

As part of the strategic partnership, partner organizations from Poland, Spain, Bulgaria and Hungary will create an innovative online platform with an e-learning course that deals with critical thinking and will be profiled in terms of countering hate speech, radical and populist content and fake news. The platform will also contain 10 ready-made scenarios of workshops for young people on the use of critical thinking to shape the ability to deal with radical and populist content. The project aims to protect young people from radicalization and manipulation by populists and anti-democratic organizations, the platform will be placed on the Erasmus + results portal and will be available to anyone interested in learning critical thinking in the fight against radicalism, hate and fake news.

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