Critical thinking, Creativity and Collaboration in Youth Work

Communication, Сollaboration, Сreative and Сritical thinking are considered to be these four crucial competencies. In this training course, we want to focus on three of them — Сreative and Сritical thinking + Сollaboration.
Creative and Сritical thinking seem to be independent of each other at first glance. But if we take a closer look and think more carefully, we’ll realize that they are two sides of the same coin, and only the implementation of both of them will lead to amazing results.

What is critical thinking?

Critical thinking is usually defined as the ability to question; acknowledge and test previously held assumptions; to recognize ambiguity; to examine, interpret, evaluate, reason, and reflect; to make informed judgments and decisions; and to clarify, articulate, and justify positions. Critical thinking is analytic, focused, and objective. The phrase that could describe it appropriately is “yes but”. On the other hand, creative thinking is generative, diffused, and subjective — and it corresponds to the “yes and” expression. Creative thinking makes us develop new ideas within or across disciplines, bring together concepts into unexpected configurations; come up with new possibilities for something that already exists, and imagine something absolutely new.
Why is it so important for individuals and the world?

• Firstly, mastery of these two competencies makes a person competitive and in-demand specialist. It enhances his/her employability and thus improves the quality of individual lives and conditions of society.
• Secondly, since these competencies allow people to feel confident at times of ambiguity, it results in morale improvements and a sense of satisfaction. The happier people are, the healthier society is.
• Thirdly, when people successfully deal with their problems, they are more likely to draw attention to global challenges such as serious diseases, climate change, terrorism, wars, etc, and make their contribution to solving worldwide problems.

As we said before, we decided to concentrate on critical and creative thinking. But there is one element, without which any Erasmus+ project is impossible. It’s a collaboration. We’d like to embed it in our TC in two ways: passively (during the team tasks) and through Open Space format (sessions where participants could share best practices – share their knowledge and experience with each other). (We also keep in mind the fourth key competence — Communication — but want to devote a separate project to it.)

Objectives

• to convey to participants the idea that the changing world requires new educational approaches and learning new skills and competencies;
• to develop critical thinking — the ability to achieve, process, understand, rationalize, and analyze large amounts of contradictory information to the point of making an informed decision and taking action promptly;
• to develop creative thinking — the ability to see different perspectives in the world, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between unrelated concepts, to generate solutions, to come up with unexpected decisions, to invent new things, to turn imaginative ideas into reality;
• to develop collaboration — the ability to work in a team to achieve the shared purpose, learn from each other, and contribute to the others’ learning;
• to enrich the “toolkit” of youth workers and NGOs’ volunteers with new methods that could be used in different non-formal education activities.

Infopack: CCC_info-pack_call

https://abroadship.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/CCC_info-pack_call.pdf