Training and Education

An Agape’s camp is recognisable for it its specific educative style, characterised by interchange and confrontation about ideas and opinions. A camp is a journey of research and both individual and collective growth that does not offer prepacked answers, but it rather suggests reflection paths and offers tools to face diverse subjects in a critical way.

Since the 1990s, Agape has become aware that it deals with an “enormous education potential […] and, therefore, with the need to systematise it into a general framework of which all those who take part in Agape’s work can be aware.” That same decade also saw the birth of the first Education Camps, in which time and effort have been invested on the reflection about the modalities of education relationship and the pedagogical guidelines followed in the centre.

We have worked on educational workshops, on games, on teaching peace and cooperation, on conflicts management, on gender differences, on the centrality of the relationship with the other, on the importance of listening, and on group dynamics. Over the years, Agape has developed several educational instruments which have characterised its educative style. All those who want to be part of a Staff Group in Agape are asked to participate to a training path proposed by the centre. This path has evolved in time, being modified and adapted according to the needs expressed time after time by those who have worked on Staff Group activities.

In 2011, a workgroup on education carried out an analysis of the educative model adopted in Agape, which has resulted in the last revision of the education mechanisms in the Centre.