Shape your thinking

About the project

Our training course is aiming to provide basic skills and experiences to youth workers in use of visual thinking and graphic facilitation methods in their youth work.

Visual thinking is a way to organize your thoughts and improve your ability to think and communicate. It’s a great way to convey complex or potentially confusing information. If your ideas can’t be drawn, they can’t be done. Visual thinking is a vital skill for developing new ideas, communicating those ideas effectively and collaborating with others to make them real. Drawing is a natural process for thinking, exploring ideas and learning. Every child enjoys drawing — but at some point in our lives we learn that drawing is the province of artists. This is a fallacy. You can draw and when you were a kid you knew it. You just forgot. During this training course we will develope the graphic facilitation skills (both manual and digital) that can be used in the context of non-formal learning and youth work.

This is an introductory course to graphical facilitation and visual thinking. It is addressed to beginners and no prior knowledge in drawing or digital graphic facilitation is required. We will develop us as visual thinkers starting from the basics.

What we will learn:
– Introduction to visual thinking and graphic facilitation methods,
– applying of basic shapes, elements and steps of graphic facilitation,
– create your own visual vocabulary (known as 8th step of graphic facilitation),
– introduction to basic use of Adobe Illustrator,
– to work with graphical markers and tools (water-based graphical markers and outliners),
– to work with drawing tablets.

What we will not learn:
– advanced artistic drawing or art,
– graphic design,
– advanced use of Adobe Illustrator or other graphic software.

Participants’ profile

Participants should be 20+ years old, motivated to take part in all stages of the project (preparation, realization, follow up), have a fluent command of English language, the gender balance in the group is advisable but not compulsory. Participants must be youth workers or local youth leaders, able to use the new gained skills and experiences in their youth work.