EDUCATION

This news update is a continuation from Essential Education’s updates from the January-March 2011 issue of Mandala located on page 26.

By Mariana Orozco, Director

During 2010 we have been consolidating several of our ongoing activities, and opening new ones, together with the ongoing work of disseminating the principles and values of EE that underlie all our activities.

Children’s activities

Since 2008, we have offered more than four different formats of workshops for 7 to 11-year-olds, some in schools, some in hired venues and some specially developed for specific occasions. A one-day conference in Barcelona asked us to organize workshops for children so that parents could attend the conference and children could learn values while having fun. We organized an 8-hour workshop for 15 children, which ran parallel to the sessions of the conference.

We have created a system so that skilled people who want to facilitate these workshops can start by volunteering and working with a senior trainer for one year, follow a training course in the EE methodology and philosophical principles, become support facilitators for another year, and then become senior trainers in their own right.

We have consolidated a team of trainers and monitors that will allow us to offer residential camps for children. The first one will run for a week in July 2011.

For teenagers

Arts and Ethics for 14 and 15-year-olds is now running for the third year in a public secondary school. We have recently received a grant from the education department of the Catalan government that allows the teacher in charge of this subject to work for one year putting together a didactic guide for teachers so that the project can be opened in the future to other schools and teachers. We will then create training courses for teachers to acquaint them with EE methodology and philosophical principles in addition to the contents, materials and exercises.

For adults

We are offering workshops entitled Keys for Personal Well-being that use both the 7 Steps and the 16 Guidelines, together with positive psychology and emotional intelligence to help people understand better how they think, act and relate to each other and how to find meaning in their lives.

Dissemination

We are disseminating our work in four main ways:

• Presentations: we have done more than 10 presentations in different contexts, from schools and associations to international conferences, including a concert. There are pictures of all these at educacionuniversal.org/actos.

• Publications: we have so far translated the 16 Guidelines for Life and Ready Set Happy. There will also be a new book with the proceedings of the Avila conference, and we are planning a book of tales for all ages and some other pedagogical publications in the future.

• Interviews in the media: we have appeared in four radio programs, and also in newspapers and magazines, which can be read/heard visiting educacionuniversal.org/difusion

• Our website: www.educacionuniversal.org and dissemination publications, such as the “presentation dossier,” that can be downloaded from the website.