PREMISE
CONTEXT
Rap and Parkour have a very wide audience, especially in the young world, although they continue to be practiced by disadvantaged groups of young people from the economic, ethnic, urban and cultural context, implying the dissemination of values and behaviors that are not educational: the line between art, display and vandalism are always subtle. In addition, spontaneous initiatives are often found among young practitioners who, if not properly prepared and performed as safe practices, can lead to serious accidents.
Music education means the development of instrumental skills and understanding of music, but also education in creativity, respect for rules, listening to others, a whole series of transversal elements, typical of each discipline. Music supports and accompanies young people to deal with difficult tensions: individualization, autonomy, relationship with others and with themselves. Rap was chosen because it is in tune with parkour and has a very high degree of diffusion in the partner countries among the younger ones.
As for Parkour, according to a recent methodology developed by Natalia Ivanova, a Danish professor of physical education, her philosophy demands not only to challenge herself but to develop the best behavior: drugs and alcohol can give a distorted view of things, Parkour teaches to calculate far distances, to have a concentration and a definite perception of reality. Rap and Parkour can also help young people understand each place as a place, a place to practice, preserving it from destructive acts, becoming a way to combat vandalism in cities, which produces significant monetary damages.
OBJECTIVES
The challenge of the ЯAPKOUR project is to create a methodology that integrates the creativity of youngsters in the local communities, in order to design an educational path that strengthens the sharing and promotion of urban spaces, creativity and physical/sporting activities. The aim is to promote rap and parkour in correct and legal contexts, that can bring positive values, stimulating artistic expression and participation and develop civic and social skills. The involvement of youngsters from marginal situations, or of social and cultural disease, with ‘street’ disciplines, allows them to be used to promote ideas such as: social inclusion, fighting discrimination and intercultural dialogue, encouraging the sharing of ideas, knowledge and skills, through informal and formal learning path. This allows us to use the new expressive languages of youngsters, as a resource for the community, and promote them as they are capable of cultural and economic innovation.
Through the use of rap and parkour, the specific objectives of the project are:
- develop effective methods to reach marginalised youngsters, promoting inclusion, emancipation, participation and active citizenship of youngsters with less opportunities and at risk of social exclusion,
- promote first rate social/educational activities aimed at supporting the capacities and professional development of the educators and of the youth workers to improve the learning of those that come from disadvantaged contexts.
ACTIVITIES AND METHODOLOGY
The project includes activities linked to the production of a set of intellectual outputs, amongst which guidelines for the two types of training activities selected: workshop for operators and courses for young learners.
The main aim is to develop methodological guidelines based on training schemes that are functional (the curricula) and supported by reference didactic materials that, being linked to vocal and corporal expression activities, were essentially designed as Rap and Parkour performance-based sheets.
To complement this, a multilingual E-Learning Platform was created to function both as a tool to permit interaction between those participating in the training activities, as well as a repository for didactic materials (text files, videos, manuals, images, articles, etc.).