Formal education or non-formal education?

What is non-formal education? What are the differences? Our trainer tried to explain the difference briefly.

In a nutshell, formal education is linked with schools and training institutions; non-formal with community groups and other organizations. Non-formal education is highly enriching and builds an individual’s skills and capacities.

This non-formal education training lasted for two days, putting together 31 volunteers from different countries and with different age in a same room to share experiences and ideas. But the aim of this training was to teach all of us different kind of non-formal educational methods, approaches and how to improve our performance at work.

We spoke about the cycle of learning process consisted of: experience, reflection, conclusion and application. We shared our opinions about the question how we should prepare activities, and what are the important factors that could influence the success of our activities.

Since we all work with kids, we shared the same ideas about the important factors as: material, age, language barriers, number of students, time, risks...

Oh, but this rainy day may looked a bit boring at the beginning, but that’s why we had the best trainers who knew how to cheer us up. Besides, with their creative games like DJPET( dream, joy, passion, energy, travel), we learned something more about ourselves, something new and fun. It was the perfect way to find a new friend or to see that your first impression about someone was so wrong. J

        The main actors of the second day were the volunteers. We were divided in 9 groups and each group had to prepare an activity that was supposed to include the process of non-formal education. Well, you can never know how creative can people be. Each of the groups had to present their activity and then we had a short discussion about the performance, instructions, conclusion...

We started with a nice team-building and non-verbal activity, continued with more and more dynamic games. We learned who likes to party, to eat ice-cream, to dance, to drink wine, to travel, to sing under the shower, to learn Chinese language, and etc.   What are the synonyms for: EVS, respect, tolerance, solidarity and confidence?  We got a lot of different and even weird answers.

How are you going to describe Leonardo Di Caprio, Freddie Mercury, Miley Cyrus, the Psy or Bruce Lee with pantomime? Or, how can you guess whose dream profession was: to be an astronaut, a teacher, a rock singer, a psychologist, a football player and etc. Can you name a fruit that starts with the letter J? Yeah, me neither. J And I really wanted to win and take one of the prices, because Maja’s backpack looked really heavy so, I was wondering what the prices were.

Indeed, we enjoyed in each activity. OK, the math activity was cruel, thanks for reminding me that I finished high school a long time ago. J