The Project
Many cultural workers and artists are facing extreme difficulties due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the resulting effects and restrictive measures. Many of these people have no possibility to pursue their art, their profession, or their vocation in times of a pandemic.
The CENTAUR project calls on artists and wants to actively support them to break new ground as they can bring real added value to adult education:
- The ability to perform well under stress
- Being balanced even when circumstances are quite demanding at the time
- Recognizing opportunities because your view is broadened
- Creativity, which makes it possible to leave deadlocked paths
- Farsightedness, because you have had important insights beforehand
- Valuing ideas, one’s own and those of others
- Ethical & sustainable thinking, because you have realized that you are part of a greater whole
- Self-awareness & self-efficacy, because you have experienced who you are and what you can do
- Motivation & perseverance, because you have found meaning in life
- Mobilizing resources, because you have a goal in mind
These are just a few examples.
In the end, everyone involved should benefit from this project:
- Artists, because other fields of activity will open up for them.
- Trainers in adult education, because they can expand their repertoire of methods
- Participants, because they gain access to tried and tested methods with which they can train fundamental skills.
The project will promote the development of strong local centers of excellence in the teaching of skill building methods. These centers of excellence will be accessible to other organizations, centers and institutions on a local, regional, European and international level.
This process will facilitate both capacity building and awareness raising regarding the importance of creativity training; it will also assist the sustainability of the project, by creating a firm base for the short and long-term use of the platform, as well as of the learning materials and tools developed in the project.
CAS stakeholders of not only local, but also national and European Union level will be invited to observe, give feedback and participate in the training activities during and after the project, thus further increasing awareness and interest in the issue of creativity.
The project aims to increase the competences (knowledge, skills, etc.) of artists in performing and visual arts, trainers in adult education and all other participants.
More specifically, CENTAUR aims:
- To mobilize and empower those active in the creative sector and in the performing and visual arts to develop online collaboration and sustainable networks for sharing their knowledge with trainers and adult learners.
- To build educators’ in adult education capacity to better identify the creativity interests especially of disadvantaged (groups of) people they are working with, and at the same time develop online collaboration and networks with the first group of creativity experts and artists.
- To help disadvantaged adult learners themselves to build their creativity and choose fit strategies and activity areas to integrate creativity in their life plan.
- To create awareness that creativity can be learned and used to improve life in crisis situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The project will introduce an open, freely accessible, attractive, modern and barrier-free creativity building platform accompanied with a set of practical, culture sensitive and easy to implement practices and creativity building exercises, innovative online tools to support the identification and assessment of existing creativity related interests and strengths of users, as well as an e-book manual for trainers in adult education and downloadable content.
Participants from the target groups, trainers in adult education and artists will be involved in the development and above all in the validation of the platform.
The direct impact on participants will be:
- For trainers in adult education to be able to help people overcome crises in better and more efficient ways.
- For artists in performing and visual arts to get in contact with new distribution channels to promote their art.
- For adult learners to overcome crises in a better and easier way, by achieving higher levels of emotional and psychological resilience.
All three groups will also become familiar with the use of eLearning platforms and IT applications.
The unintended impact: change in mentality regarding the individual’s role in the community and the society in general, boost of self-esteem, reduction of loneliness and insecurity.
