Nonformal Education

What is nonformal education? Forms of learning with a definite purpose outside the school system. We learn through positive experiences of success. It makes you more open, creative and educated, unnoticed.

The Sign Language Playground project a is Strategic Partnership and Exchange of Good Practices in Nonformal Education for the Deaf.

Activities

Nonformal methods on the field of Deaf education

Having observed different training courses as well as youth exchanges it was clear that Nonformal Education is widely spread amongst those, who were involved in the above. There is a wide range of resources and materials on the Internet written in English and other languages, none of which was available in Sign Language. Moreover, Deaf people have to face communication problems and misconceptions in their everyday life and the educational system for the deaf is deficient. Deaf people find it extremely difficult to follow a specific academic or career path. They are discriminated due to the lack of information.

This led us to the conclusion that Deaf society has a limited access to Nonformal Education. So we started planning NFE activities in a way that hearing-mpaired people could participate without feeling excluded.

It is evident that significant improvement and changes are needed in the formal education of Deaf children across Europe. Our aim was is to provide support in this change , and, by introducing innovative methods, to enable the Deaf to access languages and exercise other human rights.

Nonformal techniques

Nonformal education teaches through direct experience and the participant’s active action. It develops personal skills such as self-knowledge, self-esteem, individual responsibility and social competencies. Passive learning is replaced by cognitive activity, which also creates the motivational base for learning. Keywords: problem solving, challenge, high level collaboration, emotions, creativity, divergent thinking, playfulness, reflection, group, community experience, multisensory, joy, movement, physical activity. Experience-based occupations are especially important in primary school. The world of thinking and imagination guides the child to wonderful places and roles. By combining our great loves, nonformal education, applied improvisation and Sign Language, something has been created that we have been amazingly proud of ever since. This gave rise to our strategic partnership across four countries to further develop the methodology. The essence of the methodology is that through Sign Language activities, participants get an insight into a world where the way of communication is different but natural, and thus participate in a liberated, joyful game. The gaming experience is one of the most defining personality-shaping forces. Personality disorders, repressed emotions and passions can be derived through joint play and cooperation.

Appplied improvisation

Jel Foundation has worked with the applied improvisation method since their first projects. Our permanent partner in the method is the Grund Theater (Budapest). In cooperation with the team that introduced the genre of theatrical improvisation in Hungary, we use applied improvisation as a drama pedagogical tool, through which we introduce the peculiarities of interpersonal communication, help to develop contact and initiative skills, empathic and supportive attitudes. We place theatrical concepts such as status, character, narrative, or relationship in the framework of personality development. We have created opportunities for full communication, free movement, independence, initiative and joint play, relying on Sign Language, which is a mother tongue and identity for the Deaf, and an opportunity for hearing people to learn about a new world and develop social attitudes.

Our approach

In the Deaf education system there is no energy to develop children and young people in experiential or nonformal way. Due to the increasing dysfunctional operation of the formal education system, there is a need for disadvantage compensation and opportunity-building programs outside the system. Our method is an opportunity for that. We based the whole project on Nonformal Education methodology. Each of the leaders’ meetings was prepared and run in a way that we not only discussed the methods to achieve the project’s objectives but we also used NFE methods to do that. Beginning from energisers and group building activities we always made it through Non Formal Education tools and methods.Although there were 4 partners with different knowledge and experience of NFE - we all cooperated with one another and every time, during the meeting in each country, we prepared them in a way that NFE is used in every part of the meeting. In this way even those, who were not experienced in NFE could see how well it works, experience it themselves and learn about the rules. All the activities were based on the learning by doing method during the interactive workshops.

Youth work

Also during the Youth Mobility the whole programme included Noformal Education methods. We managed to escalate the levels of the activities beginning from the easier ones to make them get to know each other well, have some fun and feel comfortable. Each day would bring new, more challenging activities ending up with the top one (Level 20), which is specified as level 4 in “All different All equal” education pack. After the activities each time a debriefing was done, which allowed us to make sure that everyone took as much as possible from the experience for themselves.

Activities

As a consequence of the above, it is the first step to build a platform. All the NFE activities are available for the Deaf free of charge. With the creation of this platform several needs of the Deaf will be met since teachers, trainers and any profession which deals with deafness can have access to this source of information. We also addressed the need of communication between Deaf and hearing.

The main purpose of the project was to develop a methodology which combines the nonformal educational techniques applied and tested by the partner organisations in the field of the education of young Deaf persons and those with other disabilities. By exchanging and combining these best practices with the international partners experienced in the various forms of nonformal education, sharing knowledge at an international level, and by including the young participants through the Mobility Program, as well as their active contribution, we have developed a methodology and practical tool that can be used and adapted free. The goals of the activity collection is not only to boost the participants’ confidence and self-esteem but to promote the cooperation between Deaf, hard of hearing and hearing people. Inclusion, equality, respect and mutual understanding were are goals and they were all achieved in our project.

We created a nonformal activity collection of 23 exercises, which includes 20 short-format and 3 long-format exercises. They are based on applied improvisation, experiential pedagogy and drama pedagogy. They can be used in an integrated place, Deaf and hearing, i.e. the hearing condition has no significance. The exercises were specifically developed by visually replacing the auditory components and testing that they actually work for these hearing impaired people during preparatory meetings with Deaf professionals. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nonformal activity collection in the world specifically for the Deaf. In addition, it is unique that long-term practices have been designed specifically to develop individual and group attitudes and shared thinking about disability.

Another special feature of the activities is that they are also accessible. They can be achieved in several ways: in addition to the descriptions of the competencies, skills to be developed, textual descriptions containing a number of other components are also available on the website in English, Hungarian, Greek and Polish. They can also be found in the form of International Sign Language videos, which is a real innovation in this area.

Activities