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European Social Circus Training
European Social Circus Training
Start date: Oct 3, 2016,
End date: Oct 2, 2017
PROJECT
FINISHED
Social circus is an innovative tool for the education and social inclusion of children, young people and adults with fewer opportunities. Started more than 25 years ago in Europe as a pilot experience, social circus spread and proved its value all over the world. In Europe, approximately 2,500 circus schools offer educational circus activities for people with fewer opportunities, and the partner schools of this project provide circus activities to about 40,000 individuals.In his Master of Education thesis (1991), S. Ward states that social circus "offers challenge, creativity, physical and personal development. Because it is non-elitist it is more accessible to young people... than most art forms. It is not an activity that precludes anyone - all can participate and benefit." Targeting specific schools, neighborhoods and public from disadvantaged urban areas, social circus is an intercultural tool favoring community links between participants, raising their self-esteem and confidence, improving their physical literacy and developing their life skills.This has lead to the creation of a new profession: social circus trainer. However, no specific training in Europe existed to develop the competences of new social circus trainers, or to validate the competences of those already working in the field.Therefore, the Ecole de Cirque de Bruxelles in collaboration with the Université Libre de Bruxelles and 5 other partners from the European network "Caravan", also involved in this project, applied for a Leonardo Partnership project (2009-11) to create the "Framework of Competences for Social Circus Trainers". This research developed a proper bottom-up methodology based on field analysis, which enabled to bring up the specific competences a social circus trainer needs to acquire. This project led Ecole de Cirque de Bruxelles, the Université catholique de Louvain and 7 circus schools (most of them are still part of this project) to apply for a Leonardo Transfer of Innovation project (2012-14) in order to turn the "Framework of Competences" into the curriculum of the 1st European training for social circus trainers. This project called "Circus Trans Formation in Action" will benefit from those 2 previous researches in order to organise the 1st European training for social circus trainers implemented at the European level.The project gathers 10 youth and social circus schools. Each school will send 2 youth circus workers. The project is divided into 4 activities of 5 days each. All together the training will cover different issues and provide the participants with the most appropriate and needed skills a social circus trainer has to acquire. Those competences will be taught through 5 main topics:- Social context- Foundations- Act of teaching- Management and steering of teaching- Circus Techniques and CreativityThanks to this project, the participants will develop new professional skills and will be able to use circus arts as a tool for social inclusion. This will improve their employability and will contribute to the dynamics and the economic growth of the social circus sector all over Europe. Moreover it will have a great benefit for the personal development and social inclusion of the end users, which are the young people with fewer opportunities.