E-LEARNING | 08 SEPTEMBER - 03 NOVEMBER 2021 | ONLINE (ZOOM) ID TALKS! A series of 5 online workshops on 5 major topics in the promotion of "Embracing Diversity". How can differences become a source of learning rather than conflict or prejudice? ID Talks: RACE LGBTQIA+ CLASS GENDER DIVERSITY Download this and other SALTO Inclusion & Diversity booklets for free at www.SALTOYOUTH.net/Inclusion/. This document does not necessarily reflect the official views of the European Commission, the SALTO Inclusion & Diversity Resource Centre or the organisation co-operating with them. Page 2 ABOUT SALTO ...‘Support and Advanced Learning and Training Opportunities within the Erasmus+: Youth in Action and European Solidarity Corps programmes’. The European Commission has created a network of seven SALTO-YOUTH Resource Centres to enhance the implementation of the EU Erasmus+: Youth in Action and European Solidarity Corps programmes, which provide young people with valuable non-formal learning experiences. SALTO’s aim is to support the implementation of the European Erasmus+: Youth in Action and European Solidarity Corps Programmes with regard to priorities such as Social Inclusion, Diversity, Participation, and Solidarity. SALTO also supports co-operation with regions such as EuroMed, South-East Europe, or Eastern Europe and The Caucasus and coordinates all training and co-operation activities, as well as information tools for National Agencies. In these European priority areas, SALTO-YOUTH provides resources, information, and training for National Agencies and European youth workers. Most of these resources are offered and disseminated at www.SALTO-YOUTH.net. Find online the European Training Calendar, the Toolbox for Training and Youth Work, the database of youth field trainers active at the European level (Trainers Online for Youth or TOY), links to online resources, and much more. SALTO-YOUTH actively co-operates with other actors in the European youth field, among them the National Agencies of the Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps programmes, the Council of Europe, the European Youth Forum, European youth workers and trainers, and training organisers. THE SALTO-YOUTH INCLUSION YOUTH.NET/INCLUSION/ AND DIVERSITY RESOURCE CENTRE WWW.SALTO- The SALTO-YOUTH Inclusion and Diversity Resource Centre (based in Belgium Flanders) works together with the European Commission to support the inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities in the Erasmus+: Youth in Action and European Solidarity Corps programmes. Through that, it works to contribute to social cohesion in society at large. SALTO Inclusion and Diversity also supports the National Agencies and youth workers in their inclusion work by providing training, developing youth work methods, disseminating information via the newsletter, etc. By offering opportunities for training, exchange, and reflection on inclusion practice and diversity management, SALTO Inclusion & Diversity works towards the visibility, accessibility, and transparency of its inclusion & diversity work and resources, and towards making ‘inclusion of young people with fewer opportunities’ and ‘positive diversity management’ a widely supported priority. For more information and resources, have a look at the Inclusion & Diversity pages at www.SALTO-YOUTH.net/Inclusion/ Page 3 DISCLAIMER This magazine contains pictures as a result of the Graphic Recording which is an integral part of all the ID Talks events. There are four types of styles throughout the whole magazine. General Cover Picture. It is used for promotional reasons throughout the social media channels and the dissemination materials and it depicts the logo of SALTO Inclusion & Diversity, the title, and the graphic elements of each version of the ID Talks events. It is displayed as a cover picture of each ID Talks version. Portrait of Speaker. It depicts each speaker and a few graphic recording elements such as written parts of their "speech" and/or any other graphics according to the style of each ID Talks version. It is displayed on top of the speaker's description page. Main Graphic Recording Card. It is used for promotional reasons throughout the social media channels and the dissemination materials and it depicts the logo of SALTO Inclusion & Diversity, the title, and the graphic elements of each version of the ID Talks events, including the specific name of the event, the portrait of the speaker, written quotes of their "speech" and/or any other graphics. It is displayed on top of the first page of each article. Graphic Recording Elements. Throughout each article, the graphic recording elements complement the text with essential parts of each speaker's "talk". E-LEARNING | 08 SEPTEMBER - 03 NOVEMBER 2021 | ONLINE (ZOOM) ID Talks "Embracing Diversity" What is it all about? A short description ID Talks is a series of 5 stand-alone online events (workshops) of up to 90 minutes each, with inspiring guest speakers, thought-provoking insights, discussion in small groups, and Q&A sessions. How can differences become a source of learning rather than conflict or prejudice? This is a key question “ID Talks” want to help individuals and organisations to reflect upon and try to answer. After the successful first edition in the autumn of 2020 and the second edition in Spring 2021, we are continuing the “Embracing Diversity” series by organizing the Autumn edition and bringing to your attention new topics and new speakers. For whom? Youth workers, youth leaders, professionals, and volunteers involved in ID in the EU youth programmes, as well as all those interested in youth work and Inclusion & Diversity topics. Main objectives: To provide food for thought and learn from inspirational ID stories; To provide an opportunity to learn about ID topics from the youth work sector and beyond; To get information, inspiration, methods to help the youth sector address ID; To inform about and contribute to quality (international) youth work; To identify and learn how to tackle existing and future challenges within ID; Page 5 Event Dates: 8 September 2021 > ID Talks Race: The motto of our European Union is: ‘United in diversity’. Then why is the struggle for racial equality not over, and seems that it is just starting now in many places through important, big movements, like “Black Lives Matter”? What is racism and how can youth work address it? Guest speaker: Mohamed Barrie, City Pirates, Belgium 22 September 2021 > ID Talks LGBTQIA+: Social acceptance, and sometimes even the lives of LGBTQIA+ people are still jeopardised in many countries in the 21st century. How to get a more sensible perspective and fluid take on gender and sexual orientation? How to make these taboo topics talkable and could they be addressed in (international) youth projects? Guest speaker: Dani Prisacariu, Gender Talk, Romania 6 October 2021 > ID Talks Class: Almost no one speaks about class anymore, and it seems, it is something left to history or marxist literature. Why so? What does class mean to you? How classes influence and shape young people’s lives? How do we create an offer that is attractive, but also accessible to all young people? Guest speaker: Falko Blumenthal, Union Secretary, Industrial Union IG Metall, Germany 20 October 2021 > ID Talks Gender: Gender as a multi-layer social construct, but in public discourse, it is often diminished to the individuals’ physical traits. How do society's standards and expectations impact our self-image? Why are these standards gendered? How to address body awareness, body image, and identity in youth work, especially in the age of digitalization and social media? Guest speaker: Tony Lashden, Belarus/Sweden 3 November 2021 > ID Talks Diversity: We strive for equality in our societies, but do we appreciate the diversity that comes with it? Why should we talk about diversity? Why to embrace it? How to harness our unique perspectives, pool our collective intelligence to tackle the greatest challenges of our age? Why and how diversity strengthens any team or organisation, what personal applications does it have? What that means for young people and youth work? Guest speaker: Rahel Aschwanden, Instituto Now, Brazil E-LEARNING | 08 SEPTEMBER - 03 NOVEMBER 2021 | ONLINE (ZOOM) ID Talks: Class Almost no one speaks about class anymore, and it seems, it is something left to history or marxist literature. Why so? GUEST SPEAKER: FALKO BLUMENTHAL Falko Blumenthal was born and raised in Germany, punctuated by stays abroad in the USA and Latvia. After studies in political sciences, economics, and urban studies in Munich, Hamburg & Helsinki, he progressed to a Master Professional in vocational training at the Chamber of Commerce Bonn. Falko has further background in organizational design, non-formal education, and counselling for the trade union movement on regional and national level & for the international Naturefriends movements. He is interested in close interaction of political theory with the daily struggles in urban & worklife spaces. Since January 2021, he serves in the industrial union IG Metall in the Munich Metropolitan Area. Page 7 Article by Falko Blumenthal While class originally meant fleet, a group of ships, in modernity we understand class as a group of people. In the current liberal society talking about classes of people nevertheless needs some justification. Liberal theory, here John Rawls in A Theory of Justice, talks about a goal of "equal prospects of culture and achievement for everyone similarly endowed" – independent of their social class. In concrete terms, Erasmus+ as one of the largest programs of social work, youth work, and education we have access to in the EU, is supposed to support the European Pillar of Social Rights and to implement the EU youth policy. Page 8 Social inclusion, implied is the “social blindness” of a liberal policy aiming for the individual, is prominent in the self-image of Erasmus+. This promise of independence of youth work and education from social inequality remains unfulfilled continuously. In his report on Erasmus students, Manual Souto-Otero gives us the numbers [https://www.jstor.org/stable/27715452]. 48% of respondents see their parents’ income as average, 31% as higher than average, 6% even considerably higher than average. Only 14% reported to Souto-Otero their parents' income status as lower or considerably lower than average. This higher and lower than average needs to be qualified. In the case of e.g. Finland, a deviation from the average might not mean stark social inequality or a crass difference in lived experience. Unfortunately, on a European scale, this is not the reality. 21% percent of the EU population is at the risk of poverty or social exclusion [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/db1fa1ed-39c7-44d6-8998a4bd3137e2a8?lang=en]. The disparate realities in Europe can be traced along a South/ North and South-East/ North-West axis. Especially EU’s newest members show the highest rates of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion, followed by Greece and Italy as direct results of Troika policy in the last economic crisis. So, social exclusion from youth work and education, manifest here in the case of Erasmus+, reaches systemic proportions, not overcoming but mirroring social inequality in European capitalist economies. We do not reach “the” youth of Europe, we reach the richer half of society. Page 9 This realization of social injustice reproduced in social work and youth outreach is not new. The Social Erasmus charter and numerous key action prerequisites aim to address the European youth beyond the europeanized university-socialized strata of our societies. Under the paradigm of inclusion and by policy means of outreach, EU’s youth programs acknowledge factors such as community impact and addressing those communities. Without a lot of agitation, I can state "Class Matters". The actors of social work and social policy, youth work and youth policy, education, and exchange programs agree that social stratification impacts to what extent activities and measures reach different young people. Class defines your degree of participation in youth organizations and your share of resources available to you from public funds. So how do we address the matter of Class? Sociology and social policy – as it is being taught in applied social work and administrative studies – seem to draw a pyramid of economic resources from the poor to the average, to the rich. In some crass examples, this socio-economic pyramid is overlaid with the Maslow pyramid of needs: Physiological needs and safety needs at the bottom, social needs in the center, topped by esteem needs, and self-actualization at the top. This widely disseminated assumption, that an individual actualizes the next “higher” need as soon as basic needs are being addressed, might have its merits in social psychology and social policy. When these pyramids are merged, nevertheless, we find ourselves in a paternalistic framework, in which economic resources define our anthropology. Page 10 In the most extreme interpretation, we see the “rich”, self-actualized intellectuals, floating above the average people, concerned with their communities and social needs, standing atop a tribe of poor people, centering around their needs for sustenance and general safety and security. For educators in the broadest meaning of the word, this creates a problem for educational design. If the overlapping pyramids mirror reality, we face target groups regarding the contents of education. Therefore, policy and educational design tend to address creative and intellectual measures to the children of the bourgeoisie and the functional elites while training to fit in, to develop vocational skills are addressed as paternalistic measures to a group being socially, economically, anthropologically bothered. In another version of paternalistic educational design, this view from the top, the canon of European bourgeois knowledge and skills – for example how to use and how to appreciate museums, politics, newspapers, and communication-intensive exchanges – is being disseminated to society at large as a measure to better the non-bourgeois population, to put it bluntly: to teach people not to behave like a poor person anymore. If we take the Erasmus+ claim in its literal sense, as educators we can not be satisfied with the results of this anthropological stratification. So if a micromodel seems not to work, it might be helpful to look instead at the single elements of a model, here the actual and individual person. When I look at a person, I might be able to discern the different social relations she has to the other persons. Here a visual design based on David Harvey’s discussion on persons in their relations might be helpful [Harvey, David. 2010. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Brooklyn, NY: Verso., p. 195]. Page 11 What I can relate to and what I can try to relate here is, that the actual human being exists within a net in which the reproduction of daily life plays a role – from brushing my teeth to finding friends. Technology and my access or ability to its use – from a digital exchange and learning to the resilience of my workplace to technological change is a relation like my relation to nature – as a source for energy or an environment that sustains a civilization. I live within a set of social relations – not only to my friends but to neighbours, colleagues, managers, employers, and landlords as well, whether I communicate by touch, language, or legal letters. All these relations above are interconnected with the modes of production – here in capitalist economies based on social production based on the division of paid and unpaid labor on the one hand and the private accumulation of wealth from this social and societal production. Here, as with nature, the functioning of capitalism relies on the split between the use value – of my cup – and the exchange value – of the product to be sold labeled as a cup. Both dependent and interdependent on all these relations and relationships my mental conception of the world is being built by me every day of my life – including the conceptions of what is possible to me, what is owed to me, what is realistic to me. With such a micromodel, starting with the real person next to me or in the mirror and developing on the relations between the person and the rest of the social and material world, we cluster actual experiences and (possible) actions of human beings. In this way, we arrive at observable groupings of people and their common realities and interests not from an eagle’s point of view. Quite the opposite: Our point of view moves from the top looking down to a fellow person, looking at the relations, for example to the existing relations to educational resources and possible changes in these relations, in which a person lives. Page 12 If for the time being, our common knowledge about digitizing, mediatizing, and globalizing European societies may be seen from the lens of a micromodel of class understanding, three theses on the working class of and in these European countries might make sense: 1) The Working Class has, through lived experience, a mediated and instrumental relationship to society and the environment. 2) The Working Class fluctuates between a capitalist mindset of exchange values on the one hand and on a set of social relations generating spaces of trust values. 3) The Working Class developed from a (classical industrial) collectivized form of production and reproduction to a (globalized, medially and digitally determined) standardized form. If for now, these theses might hold, the question is, how to frame the role of the educator or youth worker, who leaves the eagle’s point of view and tries to work with and for working-class persons. Giving up the socio-anthropological pyramid allows us to give up the identification of intellectual, expert, and the top of a hierarchical system. Rereading Antonio Gramsci we can give up on “the intellectual” – nowadays we would say multiplicator, facilitator, trainer or decision-maker instead of intellectual – as a carrier of an “intrinsic nature of intellectual activities” and rather look at an “ensemble of the system of relations in which these activities (and therefore the intellectual groups who personify them) have their place within the general complex of social relations.” Page 13 This move of perspective allows us to stop thinking of trainers and so on – what in older versions of English would be called an intellectual – as a separate group or kind of person from a target group of an educational measure. Instead, we open up to a cocreative, co-design point of view: Our role as educators becomes that of a coach, codeveloping the spaces and settings in which the persons we work with taking on the role of “intellectual” in and for their specific realities. We overcome the paternalistic helper and reach the role of a colleague and eye-level conversation partner. For the sake of development and educational design, three ad hoc theses on youth work and social work in the Working Class may be put forward: 1) Activities have to address both instrumental and intrinsic relations to others and the world. 2) Activities, Call of Participation, and dissemination have to be anchored in the intermediate social relations of the target group. 3) Addressee of the activity is the collective or structure in which Action – the ability to perceive and to self-determined interaction with the world – has been already realized. Areas and activities from which these theses derive include trade union youth organizations, in which equal pay and ethics of recognition and respect are interlinked (1). They include Erasmus+ partnerships addressing youth centers, schools, and youth union company chapters instead of individuals registering for an activity (2). And they include forms and methods building directly atop forms of action already established in the addressed community – such as intercultural exchanges framed as a volunteer repair & work camp instead of text-based seminars (3). These theses already have anchors in existing youth work and social work – such as the international dimension of North Macedonian SPPMD’s social and street work or the international exchanges by public and private institutions facilitating vocational training exchanges and work-placement programs. Exemplary for educational work in and from the working class are activites such as “Azubis in Europa” (Apprentices in Europe) by Germany’s construction and builders’ union IG BAU: A workers organization, partnering with experts in European trainings, facilitates work and training stays abroad for their youth members. Through the democratic structure of a union organization, the activity participants (and alumni) have the organic ability to co-design and to co-develop the activities, creating an European empowerment for exchange and for realization of their own capabilities. Page 14 I want to end with a call to call: Call your youth center, school, union chapter, vocational training center, political or religious group and present them, what you and your context has to offer. Develop new and creative partnerships for your next grant proposal or selforganized summer camp and work series. Your work will change. And your work will help Change. Page 15 RESOURCES: Harvey, David. 2010. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Gramsci, Antonio. 2007. The Intellectuals. Marxists.org, https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/prison_notebooks/problems/intellectuals. htm. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27715452. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/db1fa1ed-39c7-44d6-8998a4bd3137e2a8?lang=en. Page 16 EDITORIAL INFORMATION Published in October 2021 by SALTO-YOUTH Inclusion and Diversity Resource Centre (Support & Advanced Learning and Training Opportunities within The Erasmus+: Youth in Action and European Solidarity Corps programmes) Official Website: www.SALTO-YOUTH.net/inclusion/ SALTO-Jint, Grétrystraat26, 1000 Brussel, Belgium Tel: +32 (0)2 209 07 20 Fax: +32 (0)2 209 07 49 inclusion@salto-youth.net Legal info: JINT vzw, 0441.254.285, RPR Nederlandstalige Ondernemingsrechtbank Brussel Coordination: Henrique Gonçalves and Marija Kljajic (inclusion@salto-youth.net) Facilitator: Anna Yeghoyan (ayeghoyan@yahoo.com) Digital Co-Facilitator: Maria Kousoula (marakikousoula@gmail.com) Graphic Facilitator: Olalla González (olalla@shokkin.org) General Editor of the Publication: Maria Kousoula (marakikousoula@gmail.com) Reproduction and use for non-commercial purposes are permitted provided the source www.SALTO-YOUTH.net/Inclusion/ is mentioned and inclusion@salto-youth.net is notified. On behalf of the SALTO Inclusion & Diversity!