VO1: You’re listening to the VIEWS News podcast – The Big Thing, part three.
VO2: Hello, and welcome to this podcast series dedicated to an Erasmus+ project, “The Big Thing”. This series is brought to you by some of the Belgian participants in the project, who is represented by VIEWS International. VIEWS International is an international association that operates as a network of organizations in 23 countries. Our projects aim to promote mobility and independence of young people with a visual impairment. It is also a team of young Europeans, visually impaired or sighted, who are actively involved in specific projects at the European level. Our objectives are to facilitate the meetings between young European people, majority of whom are visually impaired, to optimize the chances of these young people to be integrated in the social, private and professional life as autonomously as possible, and to develop a spirit of solidarity and democracy specific to European culture. In this series of episodes, we will be giving you a closer look at the Erasmus + project “The Big Thing” which involves the Spanish Association Arkhe as leading organization, and supported by Views International and Zavod ODTIZ from Slovenia.
Youssri: Hey everyone and welcome to this third podcast of “The Big Thing”. For that I have two guests with me here in the studio. First of all, I have– Ditmar, hello, Ditmar.
Ditmar: Hello, Youssri, how are you doing?
Youssri: I’m doing very good. You just came back from Spain, and that is what the last podcast that we will publish will be about. But first of all, maybe we should tell that you’re multiple things in this project. You are– A bit of everything.
Ditmar: A bit of everything. I’m a participant, yes. I am, I think, part of the podcast team.
Youssri: You are definitely. You’re definitely a good part of the podcast. And yeah, most of all also, if you look from the VIEWS point of view, a participant that goes on a project for the first time.
Ditmar: Yeah, that’s true. Before this project, I heard about VIEWS, but for some reason I never ended up in a project before, which was the main reason was probably my laziness.
Youssri: No comment on that.
Ditmar: My curiosity took over, so here I am. It’s never too late.
Anna: That’s true.
Youssri: And with that, you hear the voice of the second guest of today. Hello, Anna.
Anna: Hello, everyone. Thank you, Youssri, for having me.
Youssri: Everybody knows you from at least the Facebook page and probably also the newsletter, because you are going with VIEWS to multiple projects already for multiple years, I guess?
Anna: Yeah, I actually think I went to my first project with VIEWS back in 2022. So yeah, it’s been some time, yeah. And I must say, I hope I can stay as active as possible when it comes to VIEWS. I really enjoy doing activities with them.
Youssri: Yeah, they are a very nice organization that offers many opportunities to travel. And we are in a training project right now, that’s but the listeners already could hear because of the podcast. It’s consisting of an international training, but there is also the national training. And I think I want to talk with you both about this today.
Ditmar: Sounds good.
Youssri: Okay, nice. Because you’re also mostly done with it. I think you have two more sessions to go?
Ditmar: Yeah, we have two more national sessions to go, the international is done, and you will hear about that in the next episode, but national – two more ending sessions to go.
Youssri: And for the people who don’t know what it looks like, how should I imagine it? So, I understood you have like a sort of moment in the week where you have an online session, which means that you are connected on the Internet and you have a teacher, which is?
Ditmar: Giulia Pagoni, she does the online sessions.
Youssri: And then there is also another part of the national training and those are the offline sessions and that’s like a whole day that you have a training session in Liège in the VIEWS offices itself?
Ditmar: Most of the time it’s in the in the VIEWS offices itself. Sometimes we change location.
Youssri: Yeah because you’re like always in a group with- Anna, can you tell me how many participants you have there?
Anna: How many? Seven? Eight? Seven?
Ditmar: Seven
Anna: Seven, thank you.
Youssri: How should I imagine a one-day session for example in the VIEWS office?
Anna: We do have practical sessions so we either come up with our own activities, where we show our facilitating skills. Sometimes we just take part in activities that are already prepared by our hosts/facilitators. However, sometimes it is all about theory, which is also very fascinating because I feel like you can learn a lot about, of course, becoming a trainer, which “The Big Thing” is mainly all about, but also, you can learn about the Erasmus+ program itself, which I feel can bring you a lot of opportunities, especially for young people, and even young people with disabilities.
Youssri: Ditmar, can you tell me a bit more about what the training sessions are? I hear there is theory. There are exercises you prepare for other people in your group, but there are also exercises that these people are preparing for you?
Ditmar: Yes, so we take part in each other’s exercises that we prepare, and we also give a lot of feedback about things we would do different or the same, things we like about the way things are prepared. For example, we once made a theatre play about how accessible or inaccessible things are, for example, traveling. And we made a theatre play to show how accessible or inaccessible it is. We made it because it was a task that another group prepared for us. And vice versa, we asked them to play a game with linking words together that reminded you of accessibility. That’s, for example, something we prepared. But most of the time you work around a team the whole day, for example, the seven competences of “The Big Thing” project. It’s a kind of theoretical thing, but somehow they made it quite accessible in a way, to give us practical tasks to do to get to learn the seven competences.
Youssri: Yeah, the seven competences are the guideline. They are going through the entire project and national and international. Everything is based on it. But is there something like- because I understood Giulia, the teacher, is a lady from Italy, sometimes she’s with you offline, sometimes she’s online – what are these sessions about then?
Ditmar: The thing is, the more theoretical parts are most of the time online, because it’s easier to teach theory online. My experience with the online sessions is we try to also, because three hours of theory is quite long sometimes, to include some practical things, like dividing ourselves in online rooms and preparing something, but it’s always way more easy to prepare something offline.
Youssri: Also maybe it’s easier to focus because you’re together in a group and you have fun together because I also participated a bit in the sessions, and I really noticed that when you’re together there’s like a nice chemistry between these groups, because this group is a really nice one.
Anna: It is a really nice group. I feel like we started as a group and the more we get to know each other, spend time together, from a group we turned into a team. So it does have this vibe of a, personally speaking, family in a way, and something I’ve noticed during the international trainings is that when something’s off, something’s not okay, something’s happening, you usually run to someone from your national team. So I feel like those in-person sessions, the training days, they really do bind us as people, as a team. We have similar things going on in our lives, similar challenges, so that’s yet another thing that kind of connects us. So we are not just a group, we are a team, and it’s indeed way easier to focus on everything that’s happening when you’re in the same room all together than having everyone on the screen of your laptop or your mobile phone.
Ditmar: Which is also quite important, because we are learning to become trainers, we are trained to become trainers and sometimes we have to put exercise in front of a group and this is a very good test group because there is a good chemistry, there is a good trust to watch everyone, every other person in this group. So it’s really more easy to test things out and to fail as well because you know the people will get your back in the end.
Youssri: And will understand you, I guess. Okay, I don’t know if there’s something else you want to share about this experience, because it’s nearly the end, and the next episode is going to be more about what we all experienced in Spain – but Anna for example if you want to share something from your perspective already about Spain or about the entire project, you’re very welcome to do so.
Anna: The entire project is something I have I feel like I have needed for a long time now because I do want to make a living out of it, and I feel like it’s going to be easier for me to follow future training courses, knowing that I already have this background, this experience that I have had opportunities to run some workshops, prepare stuff, make my experience working in a group better. I have never been good at working in a group, and I feel like it’s only getting better. So I’m beyond grateful for that, and who knows, perhaps we can come up with a training course together in the future as trainers, facilitators.
Youssri: You never know, you never know. And you, Ditmar?
Ditmar: For me, in the start, I absolutely had no idea what to expect, but we were asked to set up some goals for ourselves. Mine have changed during the project, but I’ve realized that this is absolutely no problem, because the whole project was one big process, and I’ve learned a lot from it. Two years ago, I think, I tried to become a teacher and it failed tremendously, but now I wish I had this project before because I think I learned a lot out of it that I could have used to become a teacher so maybe I should try it again now. It really helped me a lot like Anna said to work in group but also to have some authority – “authority” maybe is not the right word, but like to make the people put their attention to what you’re saying or what you’re trying to learn them. And that’s something very valuable to me, so I’m really thankful for that.
Youssri: I’m thankful for you both being here in the studio. And yeah, I also want to say a short thing: I am very grateful that VIEWS is giving these opportunities to the people to make sure that everybody gets the chance to develop their skills and to develop their personality and traveling with people always gives you a nice feeling because you discover so much in one week about yourself about other people so I want to thank you both for being here and thank you to the listeners for listening to this podcast and we’re hoping to see you back for the next one.
VO2: This was the third part of the VIEWS News podcast – “The Big Thing”. We hope you enjoyed the podcast. See you next time!
VO1: Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.