Making the most and more of being at the mercy of COVID 19 inspired virtual reality Erasmus Project

Project Title

Making the most and more of being at the mercy of COVID 19 inspired virtual reality

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Partnerships for Creativity

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Inclusion – equity; New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Creativity and culture

Project Summary

Organisations and people working in the field of education and those working in the creative sectors all suffer from not being able to do their work in the physical presence of co-workers, learners and/or audiences because of Covid 19. By necessity, since the spring of 2020, people have been studying the possibilities of continuing lessons, training courses and performances digitally. People meet each other in already existing and (sometimes hastily) newly developed digital environments and try to make the best of it. Initially, people often did not have the time to prepare themselves for this digital work and to explore the possibilities of doing so in a group context. But the longer the pandemic lasts, the more one discovers and the more skills one develops. But there is often no time to investigate how things can be improved, because the work just goes on. As a result, existing possibilities remain unexploited and new ones are not explored. Not only in the field of digital applications, but also in the way in which they can be used and what skills are needed to do so. This is unfortunate and undesirable. Not only for the duration of the pandemic, but also afterwards. After all, it is to be expected that the trend towards digital working will continue, partly because of the benefits it brings, such as being able to work across borders at no extra cost (transnational reach). We, the partners in this project, want to use the opportunity offered by this call to explore how educators and people in the creative sector can make the most of existing resources, what is necessary to improve the impact of their digital activities and to provide guidance for this.

In our research we focus on specific target groups: 1) educators in (young) adult education (16+) who use creative tools and methods in their training or lessons to help their target group develop skills and competences that will enable them to better participate in society and 2) their target group, adult learners (16+), who are in need of these skills and competences; 3) performing storytellers and 4) their audiences.
There are a few reasons to choose storytelling from the many disciplines represented in the creative sector: the need for interaction between the storyteller and the listener for the impact of a story is similar to the interaction we experience in our work as educators of the aforementioned adult learners. We expect to be able to learn from each other when it comes to creating interaction in a situation where storytellers and listeners / educators and adult learners do not share the same physical space; a storyteller performs usually alone (there are some exceptions) for a group as does an educator; the educators in our target group work with vulnerable people. This requires certain competences of these educators, like being empathic, tolerant, being able to communicate (constructively) and express oneself, being able to value diversity and respect others etc. These competences are not so different, if not alike, from the competences that are important for a storyteller; Four of the six partners have been or are involved in Erasmus + projects in which storytelling is used as a means of bringing about social change (applied storytelling). In this connection, it should be noted that, in mapping out what is already happening in the field of digital training of adult learners using creative means, we are also looking at training methods other than storytelling.

Our objectives:
By mapping what has been done already to overcome the barriers created by Covid 19 when it comes to the presentation of performing arts and the use of creative tools in workshops aimed at the development of soft skills, language learning, presentation skills and so on, by testing and selecting our findings for their effectiveness in digital environments with subjects carefully selected according to the type of activity and by developing additional tools we aim to help educators and performers to be (more) effective in the virtual reality they have to deal with. The project will result in a toolkit containing learning tools and training modules to foster creativity in virtual realities, whether in the field of the performing arts or non-formal education aimed at the development of skills and competences and to optimise

Our target groups:
primary:
educators who use creativity as a tool to enhance the development of skills and competences
performers
secondary:
participants to trainings in which creativity is used to enhance the development of their skills, knowledge and/or competences which will help them integrate in society
audiences of digitally presented performances

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 171381 Eur

Project Coordinator

Storytelling Centre & Country: NL

Project Partners

• ELAN INTERCULTUREL
• Stowarzyszenie “Grupa Studnia O.”
• MERSEYSIDE EXPANDING HORIZONS LIMITED
• Youth association Info front – Prilep
• OSLOMET – STORBYUNIVERSITETET