EMPYRE-project explores, collects and develops successful youth work practices used to empower young people in Europe. The target group of good practices is young people in highest risk of social exclusion and outside education, employment and training (NEETs).
Evaluation and development of good practices is done by cross-national and multidisciplinary co-operation between science Universities, Universities of Applied sciences, HEI students and youth workers from different organisations.
Project explores several questions behind the successful practices: What are the contents of social empowerment? What kinds of skills and knowledge are there behind successful practices? What kind of common parameters can be found from behind ”successful” practices? How the evaluation of successful practices could be developed?
Practitioners/Youth workers behind good practices are invited to work together with project partners and students of youth work to co-create and transform the practices for innovative web-learning modules, using interviews, short movies, posters, articles, animation etc.
Results:
As a result of EMPYRE, 2 English-language online courses on empowering youth work practices and an open website that guides you to apply for these trainings were created.
The 5-credit course aimed at students is intended to be implemented as part of the curriculum of each higher education institution.
Empowering youth (nonstop start), 5 ECTS cr – Xamk
The 3-credit course aimed at youth workers working in the profession is also implemented online, and participants are divided into international groups.
Developing skills of youth workers – EMPOWERING youth work practices, 3 ECTS cr – Xamk
The courses are offered on Xamk’s open learning platform PULSE, where anyone can register and study for the courses for free.
Students from the universities involved in the project worked as EMPYRE researchers and online course designers with experts.
The collaboration brought together 10 university teachers, more than 60 university students and 14 youth workers to plan courses and build the website Empowering youth – Xamk, which contains material produced in the project, examples of good methods as well as stories, articles and inspiration.
During the EMPYRE project and cooperation, the partners learned a lot from each other and about the empowering youth work methods found in the participating countries.