1 / 13

In Defence of Democratic Youth Work

In Defence of Democratic Youth Work. Produced by Pauline Grace based on the original letter by Tony Taylor March 2010. The Story of Romantic Dinosaurs. V. The State. What are we Defending?.

derica
Download Presentation

In Defence of Democratic Youth Work

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. In Defence of Democratic YouthWork Produced by Pauline Grace based on the original letter by Tony Taylor March 2010

  2. The Story of Romantic Dinosaurs... V The State

  3. What are we Defending? • The sanctity of the voluntary principle; the freedom for young people to enter into and withdraw from Youth Work as they so wish. • A commitment to conversations with young people which start from their concerns and within which both youth worker and young person are educated and out of which opportunities for new learning and experience can be created.

  4. What are we Defending? • The importance of association, of fostering supportive relationships, of encouraging the development of autonomous groups and 'the sharing of a common life'. • A commitment to valuing and attending to the here-and -now of young people's experience rather than just focusing on 'transitions'.

  5. What are we Defending? • An insistence upon a democratic practice within which every effort is made to ensure that young people play the fullest part in making decisions about anything affecting them. • The continuing necessity of recognising that young people are not a homogenous group and that issues of class, gender, race, sexuality and disability remain central. • The essential significance of the youth worker themselves, whose outlook, integrity and autonomy is at the heart of fashioning a serious yet humorous, improvisatory yet rehearsed educational practice with young people.

  6. If we already had this there would be no need for the Romantic Dinosaur!

  7. Defending from what? • For the last fifty years English Youth Work has been under increasing pressure from State interventions.

  8. Defending from what? • During the last decade the State has introduced target- and outcome-led approaches to work with young people. The development of a State-sponsored curriculum has systematically eroded the Youth Worker’s voluntary realtionship with young people.

  9. Defending from what? • In England, Youth Workers and their managers have been cajoled , coaxed and censured into embracing the very antithesis of the person-centred Youth Work process: predictable and prescribed outcomes....

  10. Defending from what? • The State-constructed idea of ‘youth’ as problematic, and deficient, has led to an obsession with the micro-management of the Youth Work process.

  11. Youth Work = Informal Education = Social Pedagogy?

  12. The Same Tensions? • Is social pedagogy essentially the embodiment of dominant societal interests which regard all educational projects, schools, kindergarten or adult education, as a way of taking its values to all sections of the population and of exercising more effective social control; or is social pedagogy the critical conscience of pedagogy, the thorn in the flesh of official agenda, an emancipatory programme for self-directed learning processes inside and outside the education system geared towards the transformation of society? (Lorenz 1994: 93)

  13. Where do we go from here?

More Related