Promoting empowerment at school using YPAR approach:what works?

Citizenship education in schools is crucial to the processes of civic regeneration (Davies, 2014) which offer means for connecting young people to the political system, and thereby strengthening democracy (Kisby & Sloam, 2014). A growing body of research (Christens & Peterson, 2012) gives useful suggestions on the approaches and methods to implement citizenship education interventions, in order to foster youth empowerment and civic competences, such as participatory action research (PAR). Ozer, Ritterman, and Wanis, (2010), however warned on the challenges related to implement PAR in schools, in particular (hierarchical) relationship between teachers and students and competitive (vs. collaborative) learning environment. The current paper illustrates a citizenship education project, that adopted a youth-led participatory action research approach (YPAR) in a high school in Italy. The aim of the paper was to evaluate to what extent the project contributed to support collaborative process, critical reflection and offering meaningful role experience. To this aim we used a mixed method approach: we collected qualitative and quantitative data with the 48 students involved in the intervention, using three waves of focus group and a longitudinal quasi-experimental design with four waves of measurement before, during and after the YPAR. Teachers involved in the intervention were also interviewed.
The questionnaire measured School Climate, using a set of items from ICCS (2016) and of the Quality of Participation Experiences scale, in particular four items measuring quality in terms of critical reflection opportunities (Ferreira, Azevedo, & Menezes, 2012). Using a quasi-experimental design, we found a significant increase in school climate and perceived quality of participation across time compared to the control group. Qualitative accounts clarified that constructing a different learning environment, establishing a different relationship between young people and adults, and offering them real opportunities to have a voice are the key processes that can explain why YPAR is effective.

Cartographies of youth social justice

Ongoing political polarisation on issues such as migration, climate change and growing social inequality have been of concern to young people globally. Young Australians have been politically active across a number of issues, most notably in relation to climate change. However, less is known about the overall youth social justice landscape, that is how young people across a range of communities, geographic locations and social identities understand and take action against the most pressing social issues in their communities and beyond. In this research we explore the beginnings of and possibilities for creating an innovative social cartography of youth social justice that can be used by communities and young people themselves to inform strategies for social change. Social cartographies are the ‘art and science of mapping ways of seeing,’ offering important visual dialogues in which we can consider the interrelationality of knowledge across range of positions and forms of text in a particular cultural context. A number of researchers have identified social cartography as a collaborative approach to comprehensively the knowledge terrain so that we might collectively create ways to improve community and society. In our research we use range of data collection methods, including surveys, arts-based workshops and focus group discussions with young people (aged 16-25) from across Victoria to gather their perspectives on the social issues of importance and to provide insights into their sense of social justice, voice and capacity to act for social change. In this presentation we aim to discuss some of the emergent patterns across the initial data and consider the possibilities for a collaborative, interactive digital platform to map youth social justice.

Psychosocial justice, educational opportunity and inclusive cultures

Practices within education carry unique responsibilities but let us not presuppose that these rest solely in the hands of institutions or, solely in the agency of the individual. If responsibilities are to be accounted for, these at all times should be understood in personal, relational and institutional terms. Educators can actively pursue what is introduced here as psychosocial justice in direct and fundamental ways by acknowledging education’s ethical, moral and political anchoring, the constitutive nature of discursive and material of its practices, and by taking responsibility for the kinds of onto-epistemological opportunities enabled through engaging with learners. Enacted as a form of community psychology, this kind of work has the potential to simultaneously reach across multiple systems (e.g. education, justice, social services, heath, etc.), it aims to understand differing perspectives, involving the individual and the institutional, in terms of how these share responsibilities in constituting social action. Research has established a strong link between disengagement with education and contact with criminal justice systems. Connecting or re-connecting young people to education can be difficult given they commonly have experienced various forms of marginalisation in their lives. This paper suggests how communities might affect psychosocial justice in/through education. The example presented comes from the Australian state of Victoria and reports on current educational practices within the State’s detention centres and how transition to community-based opportunities are presently facilitated. Several areas effecting contemporary practice are reviewed for future development. In purposefully working to understand and promote psychosocial justice communities may be better enabled to respond to challenges present in youth justice and education practice.

Addressing Challenges to Quality Youth-Adult Partnerships through Organisational Learning in Youth-service Organizations

Youth-adult partnerships (Y-APs) have become a popular strategy in youth service organisations for promoting key positive youth development (PYD) outcomes such as empowerment and agency. Y-APs are intentionally cultivated intergenerational relationships in which groups of youth and adults share decision-making power, especially regarding issues of critical importance to youth. Distinct from other adult-child relationships, Y-APs emphasize that adults in youth service organisations are equal collaborators and co-learners rather than mere experts vis-à-vis their role with youth, and that youth’s voices are present in decision making. As such adopting Y-APs instigates a new norm of shared power in the organisation. Despite their wide adoption however, research documents various challenges that affect quality Y-AP implementation and subsequent institutionalization. These challenges fall into three categories: difficulties of role flexibility, limited perceptions of youth capabilities, and turnover and associated factors that threaten sustainability of Y-APs in an organisation. This presentation introduces a theoretically grounded conceptual framework for how community-based youth service organisations may effectively implement quality Y-APs through organisational learning. Advancing a central argument that the challenges of Y-AP implementation are best understood as challenges of collective learning within an organisation, the framework I present integrates theory and research in organisational learning with present scholarship and practice on Y-APs to delineate how two learning pathways— intra-group processes and inter-group knowledge transfer processes— in dynamic interaction at different ecological levels of the organisation may influence Y-AP quality and institutionalization. I also discuss key contextual influences on these learning processes such as existing structural and cultural features of the organisation. The conceptual framework not only provides a roadmap for effective functioning of Y-APs in practice, but also outlines a more robust theoretical foundation to guide efforts towards descriptive and causal inference in intervention research on Y-APs and associated PYD outcomes.