BEST: The Regional Meeting experience

Last weekend I went to Coimbra, in Portugal, for an internal BEST event, in this case, to a regional meeting - an event that gathered all the local BEST groups of a specific region.

Even knowing that my English it’s not so great as I would like, I was crazy enough to go as EDU-ID (BEST Educational Department) delegate, where my role would be facilitate and deliver some sessions about the work developed within the department.

Apart the material missing, the first session it was "okay" and was about the process of writing a paper, since we (department) receive the outcomes and the reports of some events (related with education), until we attend a conference, in order to present our work. Because I wasn't understanding the standard case study that I was supposed to deliver, I decided to change it for something that I was familiar with. In other words, I applied the knowledge acquired on the Erasmus+ TC (training course), in Czech Republic, about storytelling.

Using the Hero’s journey, also known as The Monomyth, I split up some papers all around the room with different stages of the journey. In each stage, there were a sentence of a movie, with the aim of contextualize the participants about what was happening in that moment of the story. At the same time, I was doing a parallelism between the passage of the movie and the work that a paper team is supposedly doing at that moment.

Maybe because I’m still lacking in English skills, the message wasn’t transmitted as I would like, however the session it was quite nice. It was the first time that I used this technique, which allowed me to see her potential as a facilitation tool. This way, I’m quite sure that I’m going to use it again.

                   

This session was followed by a discussion group that happened in the next day. The participants were quite amazing, they were very active, which was felt through the quantity of distinct points of view that were shared. 

After 2 days just speaking English, my confidence increased a lot, however in my last session everything fell apart. The last session was quite terrible (at least the beginning). For some reason, I got too nervous and my pronunciation disappeared completely, which was really scary. Once that I was sure that I hadn’t been able to transmit the message, I asked the participants to organize a Local Event on Education (LEoE) as they were doing it in their LBGs (local group). In the end, they had to present their work and give feedback to the other groups. This way, I allowed myself to make sure that they were understanding how to plan an event like this one.

As conclusion, I’m just happy that I went to the TC in the Summer, it allowed me to learn a lot of techniques and exercises that can be used during all the kind of workshops. About this regional meeting in Coimbra, it wasn’t perfect (or I should say I wasn’t perfect), I still have to improve myself in some many ways, however it was an amazing experience, allowed me to evaluate my skills and analyse my progress. In other words, my English, my facilitating skills and the tools that I know now aren't the same as when I began the EBEC Study, or when I was in Denmark as a facilitator, which is quite satisfactory. 

*I've to say that going to this type of experiences is allowing me to meet wonderful people. In this case, it was a pleasure to meet the portuguese neighbours (from Madrid). 

All the hero's managed to finish the session!!!