Youth Empowerment - Youth Workin' It

What Is Youth Work?

September 11, 2012 By Shae Pepper Leave a Comment

Q: What is Youth Work?

A: Through my experience and studies, I believe youth work is informal education, led by a reflective practitioner. It is voluntary and creates opportunities for youth participation and empowerment. It works in a way that is both dialogical (meaning through dialogue rather than lecture) and anti-oppressive.

Below is an excerpt from my Master’s Dissertation ‘Letters to a Child: A Critical Study of the Effectiveness of using Child Sponsorship as a Method for Engaging Young People in Global Issues’, published in 2009 through the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at DeMontfort University, which goes into a bit more detail about what youth work is and what the role of a youth worker is.

As it was an academic paper, there’s more academic language and referencing than we normally provide in our blog. If you’d like the bibliographical information on the references provided, please contact us.

I strongly believe that the primary role of the youth worker is to be an informal reflective educator who seeks to work in an anti-oppressive way in order to help young people develop through “choice, voice, convivial settings for learning, reflection on experience, conversation and interaction.” (Smith 2000:22) A worker must also help young people make connections that show that learning is a “fully human activity,” (Smith 2000:33) one which I believe carries on beyond school and throughout life, thereby making it an important concept to understand and skillfully master.

Reflective Practice

Firstly, learning must be modeled by the practitioner; this is done through reflective practice. Smith (2000) describes two methods for understanding the youth worker’s reflective role within the learning process. Through “reflection-on-action” after a youth work session and “reflection-in-action” during the youth work session, (Smith 2000:102) youth workers have the potential to improve their own practice and actions for future youth work sessions.

Voluntary and Participative

Youth work is identified as a ‘voluntary relationship’ (Young 1999) in which young people and youth work are in a partnership designed to support young people’s learning. Article 12 of the UNCRC (Unicef UK 1990:4) says that young people have the right to have a say in decisions that are being made for or about them. Voluntary participation can be identified on the scale of Arnstein’s (1969) ‘Ladder of Participation’ which was later updated by Hart (1992) to reflect work with children and young people. The ladder has eight rungs which range from “manipulation” to “child initiated and adults sharing in the decision making.”

Informal and Dialogical

Paulo Friere is noted as a key figure in shaping education, particularly informal education, by identifying problems within curriculum-based education and posing solutions based on respect, dialogue, action and finding opportunities for learning in every situation; the two forms of education being mainly non-formal “dialogical” education (Friere 1996:70) or formal curriculum-based education. For the youth worker, non-formal education principles based on respect and conversation can be more effective than rigid forms of “banking education” (Friere 1996:53) in which the educator is only concerned with depositing information into the educatee, rather than having an environment in which both parties can learn from the other. These foundations for informal learning mirror modern principles which underpin youth work.

Anti-Oppressive

Members of society experience unfair discrimination every day; sexism, racism, and disabilitism to name just a few. What is the difference between being discriminated against and being oppressed? Oppression is internalised, making it deeper and more systemic. According to Friere, oppression is the “dehumanisation” of people, or at the very least stopping them from fully realising their full “humanisation,” or “vocation” in life (1996: 25-26). He goes on to say that “[humanisation] is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression and the violence of the oppressors.” (1996:25-26) My understanding is that oppression is using the perceived or actual power within a relationship to maintain control over a person, the situation or circumstances. One is actively encouraging the superiority of some to the detriment of others, working to maintain this level of power in the relationship, as the status quo.

Question: If someone asked you ‘what is youth work?’ what would you say? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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How To Help Your Youth Achieve Their Dreams

July 26, 2012 By Stephen Pepper Leave a Comment

Helping youth to achieve their dreams — If I had 3 wishes……..

A couple of weeks ago, we looked at how important it is to enable the dreams of young people rather than squish them. This week’s youth work session plan idea has some ways you can help encourage your youth to achieve their dreams.

Following Dreams

Play a song or video clip that’s about following your dreams or living life to its fullest. There are all kinds of options, but a couple of suggestions are the “Carpe Diem” scene from Dead Poets Society or the video for III Wishes by Terrorvision – both of these videos are embedded below.

If using the Carpe Diem clip, emphasize the seizing the day aspect. If using III Wishes, emphasize the line at about 1:30 which says “Just decide what you want and then make it happen”.

Make 3 Wishes

Next, give each young person three sheets of paper and a pen. On each of these pieces of paper, have them write down a wish they have for their future, so that they end up with three wishes written down. The wishes could relate to careers, relationships, skills – anything.

It doesn’t matter how outlandish their suggestions may be. This isn’t the time to be a dream squisher! If someone can leave home at age 17 and go on to design payment systems, electric cars and spacecrafts (and earn hundreds of millions in the process), there’s no reason your young people can’t go on to achieve something seemingly impossible.

Identify 3 Actions

Now that they’ve made three wishes, get them to spend some time identifying three actions they can take to achieve each wish. They’ll therefore be coming up with a total of nine next steps to help them follow their dreams. These can either be written directly on the pieces of paper where they’ve written down their wishes, or you could give them nine post-it notes to write the actions on to, which can then be stuck on the main pieces of paper.

If possible, get them to make these actions SMART targets, as this will help ensure that they’re something the young people can start working on now.

The next steps don’t have to be daunting. If they want to become a rocket scientist, the next step shouldn’t necessarily be to read a textbook on rocket science (unless your young person is that advanced!). Possible actions could be to research what degree they’d need to study this in the future and to then research what subjects they could study now to set themselves on that course.

Discussion

Depending on how much time you have in your youth work session, spend some time with your young people discussing their dreams and actions they can take. Possible questions include:

Which one of your three dreams is most important to you and why?
How long have you had this dream?
How do you think you’ll feel if you accomplish this dream?
Which of the next steps would be the easiest to achieve?
Will you commit to working on at least three of these next steps over the next month and report back as to how you’ve done?

Many young people will never have had an adult believe in them – this is your chance to make that difference in their life and encourage them to make a difference for their own selves.

Check out all our other youth work session plans for more ideas to use with your young people.

Question: What songs or video clips would you use in a session about achieving dreams? We’d love for you to share your ideas in the comments below.

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Are You A Dream Squisher Or An Enabler?

July 6, 2012 By Stephen Pepper Leave a Comment

I have a tendency to be a pessimist. I thought this was the best way of being – if you’re expecting the worst, you’re not going to get disappointed when the worst happens. This also made me something else.

A dream squisher.

I hadn’t realized this was the case until a few years ago. When Shae would share ideas and dreams, I’d often play devil’s advocate and find ways to point out that they weren’t realistic or how hard it would be to achieve them. I thought I was being helpful, until Shae pointed out how this was actually squishing her dreams.

This got me thinking about all the times I do this – in marriage, at work, with friends and with youth.

Young people can be very idealistic – they have grand ideas of what can be done, as they’ve not had a chance to become jaded like us adults can be. They have – quite literally – the faith of a child. That anything can be done.

This leaves us with a choice. Do we live our lives squishing the dreams of young people, or do we enable them as best we can to leave their mark on the world, even if this sets up the possibility of failure?

As you might have guessed, I don’t want to be a dream squisher anymore. Amazing things can happen when we’re enablers, which is demonstrated in the way two youth workers dealt with situations involving their very own children who wanted to make a difference in the world.

Instead of standing in the way of their children for fear of them being disappointed when things didn’t work out as planned, they actually facilitated their children. Here’s what happened:

1) MarkO’s son Max

Max wanted to design his own rubber bracelets to raise money for Haiti. As Marko explains:

i was at a control or facilitation junction, baby. i love my son, and i want him to impact the world, and i want him to succeed. and the best way i know to ensure this is to exert my control, to take over the details and tell him what to do, overseeing and prescribing each step. i knew, in that moment, that if i encouraged him and served him, helping only when he asked, it would be a more fruitful growth opportunity for him (get this:) even if he failed.

Read the rest of the story to find out what happened.

2) Martin’s 6 year old son Joel

Joel had watched a video about poverty. He was moved so much that he chose to do something about it. He decided to try fundraising and set an initial target of £60 ($100). As Martin explains:

We agonised over that number. My wife and I worried it was too high; that we were expecting too much of our friends and family. And that’s one of the most wonderful things about what happened next – that genuinely, it was completely unexpected. He was trying to raise £60.

What ended up being so unexpected? He raised £6,000 ($10,000) – one hundred times the original target! Read more about how Joel achieved this here and here.

It would have been easy for MarkO and Martin to be dream squishers, to tell their sons not to try because they were only young and wouldn’t raise much money. Instead, thanks to having enabling parents, Max and Joel have learned at an early age that they can make a difference – a difference people living in poverty have now benefited from.

Question: As youth workers, how can we enable our young people instead of squishing their dreams? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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