What is our new project CommunityCloth, why it matters, and how can you participate?
At SmussStudio, Oslo 2024
CommunityCloth is about learning, innovation, community and… textile production. In 2023, we designed this project having as a starting point previous projects where we explored the topic of community learning.
Our unit Saber Fazer is a research, education and book publishing project whose mission is to promote knowledge transfer on artisanal and semi-industrial techniques, focusing on natural textile fibre production and processing as a way to contribute for more sustainable production value chains.
Community Learning
For many years we were teaching and educating the public in general, but, slowly, our focus changed to teachers and educators, as a way of scaling and accelerating transfer and retention of precious knowledge in the communities.
In our 2022/2023 project Cultura para Todos (Culture for All) in Vinhais, a small municipality in the north-eastern corner of Portugal, we researched and documented the local wool tradition and teached a group of school teachers, educators, social workers and community leaders on areas such as wool processing and weaving.
Later on the project, we followed-up this group in the training activities they organised in their schools, social organisations and communities.
At the same time, after organising different events for the public in general, Saber Fazer started capacity building programmes in Parque Biológico de Gaia and the Serralves Museum Park, training their education services staff in areas such as linen production, natural dyeing, sheep shearing and wool processing.
Innovation in Vocational Education and Training
After these experiences, we were interested in exploring this topic in an European level, introducing research and evaluation methodologies to test the impact of our community learning model.
By then we were managing GatewayCrafts, an Erasmus+ project were we are exploring social media learning as a way of expanding and accelerating technical knowledge transfer using social media as “gateway” to new sustainable jobs and activities and decided to submit the CommunityCloth proposal to the same programme.
CommunityCloth Activities
CommunityCloth will implement and evaluate community learning methodologies by training new trainers (we call them educators) that will later in the project teach what they have learnt in their communities (schools, social organisations, NGOs, etc). To support this, we will also provide learning materials, structured activities books and a peer-to-peer communication system so they can contact our staff and other project participants.
The project activities includes the development of learning materials (new technical books in English will be available soon!), the creation of a communication system between our educators based on an app; capacity building (it means training programmes) for the new educators and following training programmes in their communities; and evaluation of the community learning process.
Partnership
For this we invited Alternative Brains Rule, a Cypriot organisation that we met a year ago when we agreed to be part of a Creative Europe proposal (which we won this year, yass!). They will be in charge of everything related to training the trainers and of the evaluation activities.
The third partners are the super talented folks at Smuss Studio, a graphic design studio in Oslo, that will design the project identity and all the graphic materials, including the website and app. They were recommend to us by our BFF Joana Correia from Nova Type Foundry and we had previously submitted a proposal for a different project.
What we are doing right now
We are now in the process of finishing the project website, writing the technical books and will launch an open call for the training the trainers (or educators) programme to be held in Porto early next year.
Want to stay updated? So don’t forget to follow the project on Instagram.
CommunityCloth: building capacity for community educators towards sustainable urban transition
2023-2-PT01-KA210-VET-000175197
