Vocational Training Center (VTC)
Salesian Youth Ministry Sector

Contents:

1. The originality of the Salesian Vocational Training Center
2. The Educative-Pastoral Community of the Salesian Vocational Training Center
3. The Educational-Pastoral Proposal of the Salesian Vocational Training Center
4. The Organic Pastoral Animation of the Salesian Vocational Training Center

The working group in charge of drafting the document was made up of Fr Claudio Cartes, of the Red de Centros de Formacion Profesional in America; Fr T. J. George and Fr Maximus Okoro, of Don Bosco Tech Africa; Fr George Mathew, for Don Bosco Tech India; Fr Dindo Vitug, for Don Bosco Tech Asean; Miguel Esquíroz, Ivan Toscano and Piero Fabris, for Don Bosco Tech Europe"; Fr Patrick Anthonyraj and Fr Joebeth Vivo, of the Youth Ministry Sector. The final draft was prepared by Fr Miguel Angel García Morcuende, General Councillor for Youth Ministry.

Presentation:

Since its beginnings, the Salesian Society has been known and appreciated for its Vocational Training Centers, through which young people are offered quality human formation and preparation for work, enabling them to face their future with confidence and responsibility.

Don Bosco’s intense biographical experience as a boy reminds us how, by skill and necessity, he learned numerous trades while playing as a professional acrobat; he became a general of games and recreations; a founder of schools and workshops; a guardian of the rights of young workers under mutual aid associations and with apprenticeship contracts in collaboration with local businesses; he surrounded himself with staff filled with an all-encompassing dedication among the students who most reciprocated the good received by embracing the same charismatic identity.

These young and very first Salesians whom we can authentically call cofounders of Don Bosco learn at the school of their master, they are doubly his pupils. First, as boys to be educated, as wolves turning into lambs, and second, as aspiring educators, as lambs turning into shepherds (cf. Don Bosco’s Dream of 9 years).

Still today, one of the main motivations behind Salesian Vocational Training is the realization that within our centers practices and projects are put in place that are distinguished by their level of innovation, by the attention with which they are calibrated to the needs and desires of learners and families, by the involvement and family spirit they manage to trigger between the team of educators and the group of learners, by the educational success of the learners and social equity for all

Certainly, these pages should be used as opportunities to rethink one’s formative action and revise one’s paths in VTCs in a way that is more congruent with the Salesian educational-pastoral proposal. Teacher training is perhaps the most demanding phase, made up of contacts, moments of confrontation, and dialogue, but it is also the most significant investment for a real increase in the quality of the Salesian and formative offerings of one’s center.

Fr. Miguel Angel García Morcuende, SDB
General Councilor for Youth Ministry ROME,
31ST JULY 2024

Source:
https://www.infoans.org/en/component/k2/item/21561