The CLAYSS organisations from Argentina, one of the leading organisations in the field of service learning or learning through engagement, invited the Genesis Project representatives to participate in the four-month training on designing and implementing the service learning projects (learning through community engagement). For Bosnia and Herzegovina , the term “service learning” is still a fairly new and unfamiliar concept that has not yet got its official translation of the English term “service learning” and currently in the region, the terminology “learning through engagement” or “learning through engagement in the community ” has been used most often. The Genesis Project is extremely proud of the fact that the six of us had the opportunity to learn during the March-June period and gradually adopt a multitude of new knowledge and useful information on “service learning”, said the Director of Genesis Project Dijana Pejić.
The initial parts of this four-month training focused on the theoretical training, where the attendees had the opportunity to learn about the history of service learning, about the fact that the first forms of this type of learning occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century and that today it is applied throughout North and South America, Spain, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, etc.
– We are currently focused on the activities which guide us to drafting a concrete project proposal that would be used by the methodology / service learning approach, with the aim of designing a high-quality project application for the possible implementation of this project, in case of successful finding of the donor funds. We have been regularly given the tasks by our CLAYSS mentors that we need to address on a weekly basis and so far, we’ve all been very successful. We sincerely hope that we will all successfully accomplish the tasks that await us by the end of our training and thus become local experts for the projects that are implemented using the service learning as an implementation method, “concluded Dijana.