“We are More Than Just the Future!” : Youth Participation at Teach For All in 2035
3.69 MB
avoin
Julkaisu on tekijänoikeussäännösten alainen. Teosta voi lukea ja tulostaa henkilökohtaista käyttöä varten. Käyttö kaupallisiin tarkoituksiin on kielletty.
Lataukset34
Pysyvä osoite
Verkkojulkaisu
DOI
Tiivistelmä
Youth participation gained growing recognition in recent years, with youth policy councils, youth boards at the United Nations (UN), and youth participation programs in national and international organizations. However, there is a gap between the theory of good youth participation and the awareness of enablers and barriers in practice. That leaves practitioners with many open questions as to how it can be implemented and what the path towards futures in which youth participation becomes the new normal would look like.
This study addresses this gap by analyzing enablers and barriers of successful youth participation with a special focus on the collaboration between youth and adults. Based on interviews conducted with students, fellows/alumni, and staff of Teach For All, an international education NGO, this research used qualitative content analysis and a futures table to create four scenarios of how preferable futures of youth participation in 2035 could look like. The four scenarios, Growing Institutions, Connected Institutions, Systemic Integration, and Relational Integration include aspects of six themes that mainly affect youth participation, namely (1) Environment, (2) Institutional Structures, (3) Interpersonal Cooperation, (4) Mindset, (5) Structure of Participation, and (6) Power Dynamics. All the insights move along the two axes of ‘structure of youth participation’ and ‘enablers of youth participation’.
The results of this study show that first, youth participation can differ in its structure from integration to inclusion. Second, it detected that whatever structure an organization chooses can be enabled through social and/or technical factors, depending on where the focus is set. Finally, youth participation and especially futures of youth participation need a lot more attention, including an awareness of global inequalities and the challenges youth face in futures visioning. The future of youth participation is collaborative, and therefore, youth and adults need to be enabled to plan and implement it together, which requires research and strategies to think outside the box and walk paths that are yet beyond imagination. Overall, this study contributes the perspective of the future of youth participation, which has so far received limited attention in Futures Studies. Thereby, it provides results that can not only be used for creating futures of youth participation in educational organizations but also to improve participatory processes in Futures Studies that include young people. Besides that, the study adds to the field of youth participation studies some guiding insights on how the path towards a preferred future state of youth participation can look like, as so far, the existing literature mainly aims to understand what youth participation is and how it should look like.