Time for Tea is a unique non-formal educational activity which uses tea to encourage global learning, creative thinking and social action, and to give young people a voice. It is simple, fun and accessible to people of any age or ability, anywhere in the world.
Time For Tea is an initiative of Momentum World CIC. The project is being further developed through an Erasmus+ strategic partnership between Poland, Italy, Spain and the UK, together with the following partners: Associazione di promozione sociale Joint, Regionalne Centrum Wolontariatu w Kielcach, Biderbost, Boscan & Rochin.
Any teacher, teaching assistant or youth worker can lead a Time for Tea project, with a group of any age, either in school or somewhere else. No special knowledge is required.
The Project
Time for Tea is an educational activity which uses tea to give young people a voice. It encourages global learning, creative thinking and social action. It is a 3-stage process which gets children and young people thinking about important issues and then communicating their ideas to people who make decisions.
1 – Prepare
- Plan your activities. Choose which class or group of children or young people you will work with. Remember – it needs to be their own project: the teacher’s role is to advise and support.
- Encourage the group to explore the issues that matter to young people about the world, near or far.
- Facilitate a discussion and reach a decision on which topic is most important to them: what do they want to say about it, and who do they want to hear them?
2 – Create
- Get some tea, and help the young people to work together to design an imaginative packet for the tea together with their message. Encourage them to be as creative as possible.
3 – Communicate
- The young people should then deliver their tea and message to the person or people they have chosen. (They will need help from the teacher and perhaps other adults, to arrange the necessary contacts). The only request to the recipient is to drink the tea and think about the message; but with luck, they will send an answer or offer to meet the group.
- Tell the story of your project, through video, photographs or other media (again, let the young people themselves decide how to do it). This will then be shared with the world on the Time for Tea website, leading to possible links between schools in different countries, and further international projects.
Project Results
One of the problems faced by teachers is that their freedom of activity is (or seems to be) restricted by the policy framework within which they work. This makes it difficult to incorporate non-formal education into a school context, other than as wholly extra-curricular activities which are often impossible because of a lack of staff time, access to premises, and other resources. If school directors / principals and other senior policy-makers do not understand the point of non-formal learning, they may not support this kind of activity. In order to get their support, it is necessary to “speak their language” and show that their priorities will be actively enhanced by the proposed activities.
This handbook has been produced to help teachers, youth workers and other educators to understand how non-formal learning activities can be integrated into the framework of a formal school curriculum. More specifically, the aim of this document is to enable teachers to overcome obstacles and to get approval for introducing such activities (in particular, Time for Tea, as described below) into their work.
Further information is available in the Time4Tea website.
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Facebook page of the project.
Twitter page of the project.
Email: [email protected]
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