Celebrating Children – Viva: learn

Celebrating Children is a course designed to give good quality practical training on holistic child development to Christians working with children at risk to encourage better care and best practice.

How does this build capacity?

This course is a direct and practical course designed to immediately influence work with children. The course is designed to relate specifically to participants’ own work situations and provide support in implementing the learning.

Methodology

The course teaches the Celebrating Children Course syllabus which has been designed to enable students to continue their work without long stretches away for studying and to apply what they are learning in a practical way.

The syllabus covers the key issues facing children and those who work with them, taking a positive perspective from healthy child development, the biblical basis of care for children and recognised good practice using the following 8 modules:

Understanding the Child in Context
Issues in Listening to Children
Risk & Resilience
Holistic Mission to Children
Working with Children: Practical Issues
Child Protection and Helping Traumatized Children
Development, Evaluation and Monitoring of Programmes
Development of Self & Staff

A trained co-ordination team from the network facilitates the course with a series of local trainers teaching each of the modules. Students are encouraged to choose a mentor who will help them to apply what they learn to their daily work with children. These mentors will receive training from members of the coordination team.

The coordination team also carries out baseline assessments, which are used to track progress of learning.

As this course is for practitioners actively working with children, the training includes a number of home assessments with direct relevance to current work. This ensures that during the course of the training, practice will immediately begin to improve.

Time: The course can cover a period of from 8 months to 2 years depending on the learning and practical needs of the participants. Each module takes a minimum of 16 taught hours with a gap between each module for practical application and completing a module assignment.

Viva has developed resources and provides technical input to support the running of QIS. Resources that have been developed to accompany the course include:

The Celebrating Children course Syllabus with learning objectives comprising 8 modules of 15 lessons per module
Student workbooks for each of the 8 modules with a chapter for each lesson to consolidate learning and provide further reference, reading, exercises and questions
A Facilitators’ & Trainers’ Manual providing: Advice on setting up and running the course, Training Techniques and frameworks, Schemes of Work, Baseline Survey and Feedback and Evaluation resources
A CD or downloadable power point folder containing slides which can be used selectively in support of training

Technical Input available from Viva includes the following:

Technical support from a Viva network consultant about how to set up and run Celebrating Children and how to use the course to develop a network
Training of Facilitator or Facilitation Team
An international community of practice around Celebrating Children (learning from others) and links to people and resources around holistic child development

Find out more?

Download a ZIP file containing all eight of the Viva Equip Workbooks.