Voice and body of Adult Educators Erasmus Project

Project Title

Voice and body of Adult Educators

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: Pedagogy and didactics; Creativity and culture; Health and wellbeing

Project Summary

CONTEXT, TARGET GROUPS
The profession of the educator is one of “communication and performance” inasmuch as the first professional tool of trainers is their own body, and whatever impact or effect they wish to have on their learners will go through their voice and their non-verbal communication. This is particularly true for trainers in certain domains such as language teaching, intercultural trainings, theatre-based trainings, sexuality-education. Following inputs from education science about the needs and specificities of adult learners, new methodological options have appeared in the profession that invite for a more active, engaging, sensorial learning experience. These new approaches imply an even higher importance of the trainer’s posture and quality of presence. Furthermore, an increasing number of trainers are involved with culturally heterogeneous student groups, including students from disadvantaged backgrounds or different cultural backgrounds who are less familiar with Western-style educational practices. Educators become increasingly aware of the need to adjust their communication behaviour, make it more comprehensible, emphasising the use of voice, giving importance to clarity of gestures as well as to creating a relationship, using the group dynamics etc. As a consequence, the need to be more confident and proficient in multimodal communication is gaining in importance, and it is not yet satisfied by current offers: the use of voice and body is rarely part of initial or continuous trainings and very few tools are accessible to adult educators to assess their own performance / behaviour.
As a very recent development, the current health crisis posed a new challenge to many adult educators, inviting them to transpose their face-to-face trainings to a virtual or digital spaces. Such transposition requires even more attention on the quality of presence, the use of voice and body on virtual interfaces and video recordings. Our project wishes to answer these challenges.

RESULTS AND IMPACT
1. AWARENESS OF EDUCATORS’ MULTIMODAL PERFORMANCE
We develop a toolkit for voice and movement analysis to offer adult educators the means to assess their vocal performance and non-verbal behaviour during their interventions, give them the background knowledge to be able to systematise these observations and identify possible domains of development.
2. MEANS TO DEVELOP THEIR VOCAL / NON-VERBAL BEHAVIOUR IN CLASS, ONLINE AND ON VIDEO
a) We’ll produce 7 case studies describing how different methods can trigger development
b) We create a 30 hours trainers’ training combining different methods to develop body and voice
c) We develop online training materials as an alternative or support to the face-to-face trainings to develop vocal / non-verbal behaviour in pedagogical interventions.

ACTIVITIES AND METHODOLOGY
To reach our results we will
a) Combine movement analysis and the analysis of vocal profile and performance with our existing work on training posture and pedagogy to create observation grids for video recordings of training sessions
b) Test 7 art-based methods (focusing on dance, theatre, singing) to assess their impact on multimodal performance
c) Select and integrate the most relevant methods and approaches to create an integral training that we’ll test in a joint staff training and local co-construction sessions
d) Develop an online tool based on video lessons to make learning possible even when face-to-face trainings are not possible
e) Develop specific video lessons for to help educators adapt their presence for digital interface (online trainings, videos, podcasts etc.)
f) Create a short 12 hours version of the training combining elements for physical and online presence that is easier to integrate into existing trainings or to reach a wider circle of educators

NUMBER AND PROFILE OF PARTICIPANTS
The key participants of the VOICE project are adult educators from different fields wishing to develop their vocal and non-verbal skills to better deliver their trainings. To ensure that the project results are the closest possible to their needs, we develop each output through a series of co-construction events involving adult educators. A total of 14 sessions are envisaged, involving about 200 adult educators in the process. Our multiplier events plan to share the product with about 300 adult educators and members of institutions involved in their initial and continuous trainings.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 262383 Eur

Project Coordinator

ELAN INTERCULTUREL & Country: FR

Project Partners

• In Touch
• CESIE
• Associacio La Xixa Teatre
• Instytut im. Jerzego Grotowskiego