Vocational training: good practices during the lockdown.
"The most beautiful flowers bloom on the edge of the abyss."
This proverb immediately struck me because it seems to describe perfectly the target group of young people we work with. These youngsters often come from the margins of society and frequently from a very hard human background. In my city, Taranto, there are suburban districts - such as the one very close to the ArcelorMittal steel plant - in which living conditions, aggravated by a very high level of pollution, sometimes border on absolute poverty. In our area as well as economic poverty there is also intellectual poverty. These phenomena compromise growth possibilities for these young people, limiting their economic and cultural development.
Those who come to us, probably come from the edge of an abyss. Our task is to make them blossom and bloom more beautifully than ever, in the same way that Don Bosco said about our commitment to find that "sensitive chord" for the melody that is inside every young boy and girl, even the most difficult one. To this already difficult scenario has been added the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our first lockdown started on 9 March 2020 while the course for which I was the tutor - "CAD Construction Designer" promoted by the Puglia Region with NOTICE 5 / FSE / 2018 - and lasting 600 hours with the aim of achieving a professional qualification, had started already in November 2019. The topic of this training was focused completely on building design made through the use of CAD programs such as "AutoCAD".
My first thought was to send a clear message to all of our students: let's not stand still. For motivation we began a social campaign to involve our students in a contest called "Fabbrica Bellezza” - which we can translate as "Beauty factory". Producing beauty through the arts, ingenuity, cookery, makeup and even with AutoCAD while staying strictly at home! The ferment I wanted to create arose from the strong and consolidated belief that everything would be fine. The kind of "suspended life” created by the lockdown was an opportunity for self-exploration, getting to know one's character better and expressing one's creativity by coloring the lockdown with this inner beauty.
In particular regarding my course, we were already in the mood to participate in the Environmental Olympics contest. For some years, my city has been rediscovering the importance of environmental protection: being victims of incessant pollution our young people are each day more attentive to ecology and so it wasn't difficult to get the whole class to attend the contest meetings. The planning of the course had already provided for the teaching of "Environmental sustainability" and this aspect was certainly helpful in introducing the possibility of taking part in the Environmental Olympics using the skills that the students were acquiring during training. However it was difficult to induce the students to make a project for the contest using strictly the skills of the training path.
We started using Zoom to be able to hold meetings of up to 40 minutes. Our meetings, which would quickly become brainstorming sessions, had also to be educational to improve their ability to summarize. Another target was to prepare students for whatever type of business organization they might meet in the future world of work. For this reason each one of us had to be good at making a quick and clear contribution to developing our ideas. We started by playing with creativity and applying the guidelines of Edward de Bono's book "Six Thinking Hats".
During the first meeting each student was encouraged to say the first thing that came into his mind about the environment in our territory. Then we began exchanging the "hats" to find the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities of each idea. We prepared a breakdown then put together our thoughts again in an attempt to identify something original and replicable in the real world.
Following an initial period of common collaboration, despite efforts to keep the students united and cohesive, three different groups were born but finally only one group continued the work for the contest: the "Ecodreamers". The participants were: Francesca Di Girolamo, Angelo Moscato, Giuseppe Putignano and Francesco Sisti. With this group we started intensive meetings giving specific tasks to each member of the team to be completed within a set time limit. Focussing on target and detail was a crucial discriminant in the development of ideas.
Sometimes the fear of failure, stress from the lockdown and dissatisfaction made the group unstable. Mediating was not an easy task. In addition to a pragmatic way of intervening, I also chose not to act, letting the students find agreement amongst themselves. However, dissatisfaction is not just a negative feeling, I think that creativity is a form of proactive dissatisfaction! So this sentiment was transformed into further improvements for the project. We have eliminated unnecessary elements and oriented the idea towards the potential target audience. Finally, we designed it in a definitive exhibition form to be compliant with the regulations and functional to success.
The students created a video in which we showed the redevelopment of a square in our city which was in a complete state of abandon. All this preparatory work served to integrate the theme of environmental protection with teaching the use of autocad. This method allowed for unlimited ideas to work on, and the activity was perceived not as a "task" but as fun. The target was to generate a sort of spillover effect that would allow the natural integration of the training course topics with those of the contest dedicated to the environment. In this way it was quite natural to think of carrying out the project through the skills of the training path that the students were following.
The contest included a popular jury and only the idea that would have the greatest number of "likes" would win. For this motivation the video needed to be very captivating and clear in all its elements. For the promotion the team worked not only through social media but also through all local media, involving the entire community of the city and the shire of Taranto. Let's see the video:
The students conquered the top of the podium in the "Environment Olympics" contest, but we didn't stop there. We continued with the promotional action because the entire community involved deserved the victory. But above all, these young flowers, grown on the edge of the abyss, could really show everyone their splendid flowering.
I will close by entrusting my conclusions to the words of Goethe:
“If we treat people as if they were what they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming”
Press review: