Competendo’s main focus is to shape and strengthen key competencies of individuals and to support an applied learning outcome in their life as active citizens and changemakers. We promote a learned outcome wider than knowledge, including the practical skills of learners and their attitudes. We hope that these competencies will help people be better prepared to thrive in complex social situations.
Key Competences and Learning
Competence-centred learning processes cover a broad range of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that one needs for successful problem-solving techniques in modern society. They help the individual to develop their key competencies and have an active attitude towards the idea of life-long learning.
Experiential learning is a holistic process of individual development that brings relevance to the knowledge, skills, and attitudes of the participants. It combines the learning opportunities of everyday life and scholastic institutions with all other possible activities that are available in society.
Empowerment
Empowerment is the learning and developmental process of raising social, spiritual, economic, and political capacities of individuals or communities. It also means encouraging people to engage in decision-making so that they can have a real impact in their communities, places of work, and homes.
The fundamental
didactical approach we promote is the idea of
empowerment as a tool to help each individual to act self-responsibly and with a sense of purpose. We hope to equip individuals with skills, knowledge, and competencies that will promote empathy and a desire to share their influence and power as self-responsible individuals.
Group-related and Interpersonal Aspects
Following the idea of competence based learning and empowerment we need to reflect the learning conditions in classes, seminar rooms, civil society groups and jobs. Since social life is shaped through group and intergroup collaboration, we need to reflect the specifics of social groups as collective spaces for involvement and as learning spaces. This starts with a new understanding of the role of a teacher or trainer as a facilitator.
Personal cooperation is a management instrument and a learning opportunity for enhancing soft skills. The more diverse groups are, they need to reflect and to apply cooperation models or ways of decisionmaking. These necessary reflections include a more detailed understanding of group processes and team roles.
Communication skills lead in the best case to understanding, efficiency or appreciation of the involved communication partners. This section introduces models that illustrate conditions for successful communication and offer models for gaining communicative competence.
Developing diversity consciousness and managing diversity in groups increases the quality of participation and includes different social backgrounds and experiences in collective processes. Including aspects are work against structural discrimination and under-representation of marginalized groups, as well as fostering those who have not yet developed the capacities to become involved.
The capacity to conflict resolution influences the quality of collaboration and cooperation in the group in a positive way. With conflict management we improve the quality and efficiency of communication and equip our participants with conflict management skills.
Definitions & Terminology
Introduction: On this page we collect links to external glossaries and sources.