Special Newsletter

Research Projects from Fundación Diagrama

The project

The aim of the 'RENYO – Re-engaging young offenders with education and learning' project, in which Fundación Diagrama participates, is to enhance educators’ capability to re-engage young offenders with education and learning whilst in secure custodial settings in 4 partner countries (the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Spain).

This requires the training of education staff to use the Authentic Inquiry methodology as an intervention to enrich educators’ repertoires in learning design.

Authentic Inquiry is an intervention designed to build personally relevant knowledge which is useful in education. The personally relevant topic is identified by the learner, enabling greater opportunity for connection with the learning process during the 8 steps of the methodology:

Training educators during the COVID-19 breakout

The COVID-19 outbreak posed challenges to everyone, including RENYO. However, project partners managed to adapt working methodologies and overcome this moment of crisis by finding new strategies to involve educators working with young people in conflict with the law in trainings sessions to take place between January and March of 2020, which, in certain cases, were delayed a few days.

Whilst some partners did manage to successfully conduct face-to-face trainings, others tried out new methods and went digital by conducting online training using interative tools such as Zoom, Padlet and Zeetings. This was the case for Fundación Diagrama, whose training took place online via Diagrama Talk.

During the training sessions, educators from the UK, Italy, Spain and Germany learnt about the 8 Steps of Authentic Inquiry and about techniques and tips to re-engage young offenders in education and learning and tried out the methodology themselves. In fact, educators worked on producing some really interesting objects! For instance, an educator from Italy shared with us a homemade video based on his grandfather’s helmet which had saved his life during the Great War and held special meaning for his family. Have a look by clicking on the picture below!

The training, either face-to-face or online was also a geat moment of exchange and reflection for educators and a chance to learn new, digital approaches to education.

“It’s a good approach if you want to study a subject openly and learn a bit more, without it being completely unstructured...”. Assistant from Germany

“I think this methodology helps us in raising the child’s awareness of the fact that if he or she wants and puts effort into it, he or she can achieve the aims of his or her future.” Educator from Italy

Project meetings

The four partners from the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Spain met online as planned on the 29th of April 2020 to discuss how better to use the Learning Journey Platform to engage learners and how to use the ‘spider web’ to assess their learning journeys.

The partners also discussed how to go forward with data collection for RENYO’s Research, including an analysis of the quantitative and qualitative indicators regarding changes to education staff’s capabilities to understand and respond to young people’s educational needs.

Next steps

Autumn awaits RENYO partners with supporting educators in conducting the Authentic Inquiry, including the use of the Learning Journy Platform and collecting all necessary data for the Research Paper.

For more information

Renyo has its own website and Facebook page. Check them out to see the latest updates!

Our partners at CESIE have also produced a short brochure describing the details of our project. It is now available in four languages on the project website.

Partners