Youth Professional Development Workshop May 2019
May 2019 saw our first ever Professional Development Workshop for Youth. In the past we have run six Professional Development Workshops - none of these ever targeting a specific age group before. For 2019's PD Workshop, we targeted youth doing any type of language work, from around the country, aged 18-30. All of our participants come from various places and language groups from around Australia, to participate in a 4-day workshop in Melbourne. We tailored our training program to the skill needs and wants of the participants that attended. For this workshop, the training focus was in linguistics, language documentation, sound recording and editing, public speaking, language teaching, and project planning. Sharon Edgar-Jones, Annalee Pope, Michael Jarrett and Nathan Schreiber were our guest trainers helping the Living Languages/RNLD training team deliver everything over the 4 days. One of the training focuses being public speaking, on the Thursday night Living Languages/RNLD hosted an intimate public speaking event for the participants to practice their public speaking. Our participants, Anil, Kaitlyn, Lakota, Robert and Vincent all did a great job sharing with a small audience about their language journeys, passions and visions for their languages. It was a huge jam-packed 4 days, but made the most of the time we had together.
This year's PD Workshop was a very momentous workshop - not only because it was our first ever PD workshop for youth, but because we also had 3 previous PD participants join us as mentor/trainers. Annalee, Sharon and Ebony were all previous participants of the Professional Development training stream, each coming from the past three cohorts of participants. It was great for them to be a part of the new PD workshop, training and mentoring people that were in the same position as them when they attended Living Languages/RNLD's PD workshops.
We appreciate all the time and effort of everyone involved in bringing the workshop together. A big thank you to all our participants that attended - it was such a pleasure meeting you all. We are all so excited to see where your language journeys lead you in the future. All the best!
