Community Engagement with Young People

Abstract

Increasingly, post-secondary programs engage with young people in the community as a form of outreach and/or program specific experiential opportunity. There are great benefits to these opportunities for students and the community alike, however, it is imperative that students learn foundational material in order to be responsible and accountable community engaged citizens, especially when working with young people. As such, access to quality training in how to effectively and responsibly interact with young people is a valuable resource for many. This interactive digital training module offers fundamental skills central to engaging young people in the community and can be easily adapted into existing learning management systems and customized for a variety of program contexts and local training scenarios. This training module will serve to enhance communication and collaborative skills for post-secondary students, allowing them to adapt to dynamic employment environments. This module contains training elements related to factors important for inclusive engagement of children using inquiry-based teaching and improved non-verbal performance and is suitable for training any facilitator in the fundamentals of engaging with children.