Anti Bias and Intercultural Learning in Context of Youth Work and Informal Education
Cultural diversity, democratic understanding and tolerance are terms that are often heard and emphasized. They are used to counter the loss of perspective as well as the social disadvantages that youth experience, and also the discrimination that is especially intensely felt by immigrants. The instilling of values and norms like human rights, democracy, sustainability and social integration has been declared as a goal of the collective European education policy.
RAA Brandenburg initiated a transnational project that is to be funded by the EU for a period of three years within the scope of an action program called “Youth for Europe.” This program is an important contribution to the furthering of young people’s democratic understanding and will also help to strengthen solidarity. International trainer education in the Anti-Bias approach will be conducted together with partner organizations from Poland, Croatia and Italy. The Anti-Bias approach, understood as prejudice-aware training and education, is one of the most comprehensive and innovative approaches within the scope of antidiscrimination educational work. The trainer education focuses on the several year-long experience that the RAA Brandenburg staff members have with the approach. Through this training, the members of the partner organizations ODN and Civilitas (Zielona Gora), VIMIO (Vukovar) and bbjshare.it (Palermo) will be made familiar and competent in the Anti-Bias approach. They will be able to customize any learned material for their specific requirements. The approach, along with other intercultural learning methodology, will be proven in the context of national training education. It will be further developed for specific situations. Moreover, it will be used in practice in youth encounters, in which young people from all four countries who are participating in the project will gather.
The experiences collected here will be presented to the field experts in the form of conferences in the involved countries, along with contributions from current multicultural education methodology developments. A total of five conferences will be held at the project sites alternating biannually. The project is focusing on a synergy effect that can develop from contributions from the diverse European partners.
