Learning to Communicate and Collaborate through Bodily Expression and Art Erasmus Project

Project Title

Learning to Communicate and Collaborate through Bodily Expression and Art

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 : Strategic Partnerships for youth

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Creativity and culture; Access for disadvantaged; Youth (Participation, Youth Work, Youth Policy)

Project Summary

CONTEXT
COOBA addresses the needs of youngsters with low level of education, possibly with migrant/minority background, facing school failure, fewer employment opportunities, and often suffering from discrimination. This complex conjunction of disadvantages and social stigmata can lead youngster to be socially excluded, and marginalized in the labor market. James Heckman (Nobel Prize 2000; Economics) accounts that there is a direct correlation between soft skills and personal and/or professional achievement. Thus, our project has the ambition to enhance soft skills competences to foster these youngsters’ empowerment, social and cultural inclusion.

OBJECTIVES
1- designing a new methodology combining a, art and cultural mediation and b, bodily expression activities for soft skills learning
2- conceiving physical activities to explore artworks empirically and to use bodily expression to improve disadvantaged youngsters’ soft skills (communication, cooperation and conflict management)
3- using elements of the European cultural heritage to connect people
4- launching and pursuing collaboration among facilitators, teachers and other professionals working with youngsters, around COOBA soft skills learning activities.
5- organizing a multilateral, non hierarchical workshop where youngsters, decision makers and employers interact with each other and co-create a corporate artwork
6- developing a new scientific assessment tool to measure and compare objectively the methods and the soft skills development targeted in COOBA.

NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTS AND IMPACTS
Disadvantaged youngsters, possibly with migrant or minority background, suffering from discrimination, school failure and low-qualification will constitute our primary target group. During the project we will recruit at least 60 youngsters, to participate in our activities and improve their soft skills.

The secondary target group is constituted by professionals working with youngsters and who are potentially interested in how to develop soft skills through cultural mediation and bodily expression activities. During the project we will contact at least 120 facilitators, and organize to them trainings to share our combined methodology and the use of video analysis to assess soft skills learning.

We will reach about 15 policy and decision makers, employers inviting them to participate in a special workshop with youngsters. They will have the occasion to test the relevance of our methodology and potentially to reuse it in another context with youngsters or with another public. This workshop has an important impact as it allows to organize cooperative collaborations between individuals who usually never meet in a non hierarchical setting (i.e. disadvantaged youngsters and employers).

The dissemination actions we will undertake will reach about 5000 professionals within the education/cultural sector, showing how to embed soft skills learning within cultural and art mediation and body expression.

DESCRIPTION OF METHODOLOGY TO BE USED IN CARRYING OUT THE PROJECT

COOBA is based on the combination of various pedagogical approaches: cooperative, action-based and non formal learnings, adapted to the fields of art mediation, cultural mediation and body expression in order to build an innovative program of soft skills learning, (communication, cooperation and conflict management skills). The hypothesis is that activities connected to art, cultural mediation and to body expression are especially relevant for non formal learning of soft skills. Such activities create situations in which participants can use and develop their abilities to communicate, cooperate and to deal with conflicts. Furthermore, they can enhance creativity, from both the cognitive and embodied perspectives. Soft skills’ learning combined to the exploration of the European cultural heritage helps to enhance the youngsters’ social and cultural integration.

POTENTIAL LONG TERM BENEFITS
DADAU and MFAB will continue to apply the methodology of soft skills learning through art mediation and body expression within their own programs, pursuing their goals of fostering disadvantaged youngsters’ empowerment. They will possibly apply this methodology to other disadvantaged groups (e.g. adults), using the assessment tool for adapting their pedagogical activities to other types of public interested in soft skills improvement. Further collaborations could also be built around the COOBA methodology with other educational and cultural institutions for pursuing the development of empowering various types of publics.

With COOBA, LiU opens a new research field in soft skills understanding and assessment, namely the interactional and multimodal approach of soft skills, the video-analysis affording new indicators, largely absent of today’s research. LiU could become a leader in the research field of video based description and assessment of soft skills with pedagogical applied impacts.

Project Website

https://www.mfab.hu/cooba/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 175649 Eur

Project Coordinator

de l’art et d’autre & Country: FR

Project Partners

• LINKOPINGS UNIVERSITET
• Szepmuveszeti Muzeum