It is called “Training of Trainers” and is the project that Rondine Cittadella della Pace, in collaboration with Fondazione Cariplo, has activated in the Lombardy region to support peace education and promote a new culture of relationships, capable of enabling young people to become active citizens, protagonists of a new world, between commitment and the desire to relate to the territories and the world.
Starting from the broader experimental path, already active in several Italian schools, which is called “Sezione Rondine” and integrates innovative teaching with the regenerative experience of the Rondine Method for conflict transformation, “Training of Trainers” aims at training trainers, which is the basis of the same Sezione Rondine, with the common goal of combating educational poverty, aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic, through the acquisition of a new culture of relationships, built with a sense of care, respecting differences and through the transformation of daily conflicts into opportunities for growth and sharing.
For six months (from September 12, 2022 to March 12, 2023), a group of 30 participants was involved, composed of 28 teachers from the Liceo Scientifico “M.G. Vida” of Cremona, the Liceo delle Scienze Umane – school site Isis Romero Albino of Bergamo and the Liceo Artistico “P.L. Nervi – G. Ferrari” of Morbegno (SO), as well as 2 students trained with the “Tutoring Online Program” project supported by Fondazione Cariplo.
Through a mix of methodologies designed and conducted by the Rondine Academy education team, the training proposal also took into account well-identified cultural and territorial needs. The result was an innovative and organic training path structured into three macro-moments: “First steps”, “Experience”, “Generative Bridge”.
With “First steps” the participants learned the meaning of the three key words of the Rondine Method (conflict, relationship, enemy) training themselves to recognize the authentic and constructive part ofhuman relationships.
The “Experience” marked the culmination of the training and took place in the Cittadella della Pace in Arezzo, an ideal and unique place to create and cultivate a generative relational habitat, in which participants are called to get involved and leave their comfort zone to start building and experimenting with new relational dynamics, capable of transforming conflictual issues, freeing up blocked energies and developing unexpected abilities.
Finally, “Generative Bridge” is the phase of accompaniment to field practice, to experiment with relationships in everyday life using the new “lenses” acquired during the previous steps of the course. Through a series of guided weekly activities, participants were followed on a path that ideally constituted a generative bridge to the discovery of a new and powerful energy, with the aim of supporting and putting into practice the process of change.
Michela Fomiatti from Sondrio recognized the importance of working on relationships: «I have never thought of emotions as skills that can be improved. Changing approach, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, having empathy and compassion, taking care of the relationship. Now I can say that Rondine has opened some breaches in my emotional being, it is helping me to smooth out beliefs and have a new and interesting area to explore and deepen».
«The full immersion of Rondine Academy literally threw us, with our backs to the wall and out of everyday life, into a new relationship and into a projection with a teacher-student relationship “to be cared for”. At the same time, it allowed us to reread our fundamental relationships, between past and present, with this perspective. It was a surge in awareness with respect to caring for relationships and a progressive acquisition of an active role in the same», commented Anna Adami, teacher at the “Vida” High School,
«No relationship, just as no city, is or can be the same as the others: each one is born, grows, evolves and is continuously remodeled. This dynamic cycle, however, implies the need to carefully take care of the habitat in which one lives, be it urban or relational. Rondine is a new polis, the place of encounter and comparison: upon arrival, one can choose to lay down one’s weapons and then discover, with surprise, that one feels even more disarmed, yet even stronger», were the beautiful words of Sarah Gazzola.
