Читать книгу Young People’s Participation - Группа авторов - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIt’s okay to think freely: how participation changed us
Christina McMellon, Katherine Dempsie and Myada Eltiraifi
Introduction
While there is a significant literature exploring the theory and practice of young people’s participation, there is less written about young people’s experiences of taking part in participation activities. This chapter, co-written by two young people who volunteer with a project called Young Edinburgh Action (YEA) and a member of staff who used to work with YEA, provides a rich exploration of such experiences. The chapter comprises a ‘story’ written by each individual author detailing their time with the project. The stories do not have a common structure but rather reflect the aspects of the individual’s experiences that they consider to be the most important and meaningful.1 After the three stories there is a discussion section that was generated from a group discussion between the three authors about the commonalities and differences between the three stories (see also Chapter 13 in this book).
Box 3.1 Young Edinburgh Action
Young Edinburgh Action (YEA) was established in 2013 as an innovative approach to implementing the city’s participation strategy.
Action research groups are at the heart of YEA’s approach and enable a core group of young people to explore a topic and research the views of other young people in Edinburgh. Three topics for action research groups are chosen by young people each year.
A ‘Conversation for Action’ is convened at the end of each action research process and is an important interface where young people and senior decision makers invited by the young people come together to discuss the topic and develop an action plan. Young people present their learning, ideas and recommendations in order to facilitate meaningful dialogue between young people and relevant policy makers and senior officers.
More information about YEA is available from: https://era.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/1842/16875/CRFR%20briefing%2085.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
Myada’s story
I remember not really wanting to join YEA; my mum just wanted to get me out of the house and she said, “Oh there’s this thing at the council, I’ve signed you up for it, you have to go.” I don’t remember much about the event except there was food there and I enjoyed it! I remember giving them my phone number and then very quickly I was going to up to three different meetings every week.
Everyone in the groups was from different backgrounds and everyone had a different story and I really liked that. I liked how crazy and fun it was. We’d be doing stupid stuff all the time but it was okay to be stupid. I didn’t like high school and I didn’t have a lot of friends there, so it was nice to be in an environment where people didn’t know me already and I could just be myself and people liked me for me. I could talk about things that were important to me with people my own age and no fear of getting in trouble or being judged like at school or at home.
I didn’t feel that strongly about politics when I joined YEA, but through going to the meetings I started thinking, “Actually, yeah, 16-year-olds should have the vote.” I really started to feel passionate about the subject, and then that’s what sparked my interest in politics and stuff.
The Conversation for Action for the Votes at 16 Action Research Group was in one of the rooms in the city chambers. I remember showing the video that we’d made and then I remember feeling kind of stupid about the video and thinking, “They won’t understand our inside jokes and maybe they won’t take us seriously.” But then I remember that we talked and got our points across and then I remember leaving and thinking like, “Yes! We just did that, that was really cool.” But it was frustrating because we said, “What are you guys going to do about this?” and they said, “We’ll get back to you about that ’cos we need to speak to our superiors and we need to have another meeting to talk about it” but nothing happened.
At the time I was very curious about the world; I was questioning all these things and the more I learned about the world and the more I became friends with these people and learned about their experiences and things they’d done I was like, “Oh I wanna do that”, but then I’d realise that, “Actually no I can’t do that because of my parents or because this goes against my religion or this goes against my culture.” My parents didn’t like that I was questioning our community and how traditional it is. It annoyed me because I wasn’t being influenced, I was like, “I’m making my own decisions, I’m learning these things and then I’m choosing, do I believe this or do I not, do I agree or not.” There were all sorts of little things. For example, I remember not being able to say the word sex and beginning to think, “Why am I not able to say that word?” and then later thinking, “Me not being able to say that word is giving power to the word.” I tried to explain that to my parents but they just didn’t get it. And also I would go to events and be startled by what people looked like, so like girls with really short hair or guys with long hair or girls that identified as guys, just all that sort of thing that I was not used to, and the more I met new people the more I learned to accept that it was okay and it was normal. And then I was so proud of everything we were doing. I was especially proud of Alex and Charlie.2 I couldn’t wait to be able to say, “I’m a published author.” I thought it was so cool that we’d done that and how much hard work we’d put into it and that we were helping to educate little kids.
The most important thing I’ve learned from all the different groups is that it’s okay to think freely, that it’s okay to have an opinion and that, even if people don’t like your opinion, it’s still okay and you shouldn’t change that opinion just because you are afraid of what other people might think. YEA also taught me that I can be friends with adults. In my culture you can’t be friends with them because there’s a barrier of respect that you have to have for them. YEA taught me that you can respect someone and also be friends with them. None of the staff talked to us as if we were children or too stupid to understand complex things.
When I was 16 there was so much of a clash between the world that I was living in and the world my parents wanted me to live in. It got to a point where whenever I wanted to do something that I knew they wouldn’t like I was too scared to talk to them about it, so I would lie and I would say that I was doing something that I wasn’t just so that I could be with my friends and do normal teenager-like things. And then the more I lied, the more difficult the relationship got.
I left home and I was homeless for four months, just couch surfing, moving from house to house with my little suitcase. I finally got a place in a hostel and I lived there for nine months and it was difficult. That was the point I was quite crazy and impulsive, and I didn’t care about my education at all. I stopped going to school, I stopped really caring about my future. My motivation went down and my mental health started to break down. The people who lived in the hostel they didn’t care about their lives either, they didn’t care about school and that was who I was surrounded by. Then eventually I got my act together towards the end of those nine months and I tried to go to school more and to prioritise what was important in my life. And then I got my own flat.
Over that time I stopped going to as many meetings with YEA because everything else was happening. It was difficult because it was just me and I didn’t have parental support, but the YEA staff were amazing at helping me and making sure that I had all the support I needed to help me deal with stuff. I remember always feeling comfortable talking to them about my life and what was going on. It felt natural to talk to them because they already knew me, they knew my background and knew my story. We had a day where all of my YEA friends came round and we painted my new flat. Like everyone! People came who I hadn’t seen for ages and it was a lot of fun. One of the girl’s mum even came round and brought some furniture. I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t gone to that first meeting with YEA ’cos YEA is just so intertwined with a lot of things in my life.
Katherine’s story
From what I remember I got involved with YEA through school. Every morning my teacher would read out things in registration class and when she read this one out she said, “This is a great opportunity, it seems like a you thing” and I was like, “Yes, that seems like a me thing!” I guess I was always a bit of a social warrior in some ways.
The first thing I did was the peer mentor training. I was a baby, a 12-year-old girl who didn’t say anything and always had her hair up in a ponytail – I was so shy! Lots of shy people might have stopped going, but I kept going and I stayed silent but still took everything in. At that point I didn’t know much about politics and the others would all go off on all sorts of tangents, I was learning so much about things that I’d had no idea about. It was around the time of the independence referendum and everyone was very heated in their opinions and that was really interesting; in school our teachers avoided the topic but in YEA those conversations were encouraged. And what was good about it was that it wasn’t a big group, there were only about ten people, we were always sat in a circle so I never felt excluded.
Then I got involved in the gatherings and the action research groups. At first I was a bit confused about what was going on, but confused and enjoying it so it didn’t matter that I was thinking, “Why am I doing this?”, and then it got to the point that I was like, “Okay, I think I understand what I’m doing now” and then suddenly, “I’m also chatting loads! What? I’ve changed!” So you stumble slowly further and further into it and then you’re like, “Okay, I’m fully in this now!”
It’s like a wee community – that’s important – I don’t feel like we just come to do the activity, we come to see the people. It’s important that there’s a time in each meeting just to catch up. I feel like the staff are aware that it is a safe space for us. When people come from all over the city they want to chat and I feel like the staff are very good at respecting the fact that that needs to happen. I also feel like the open atmosphere is really important; you can say anything, there’s not exactly rules but there is respect. If you disagree with someone, you can just say, “I don’t agree with you because …” and then you explain why and people will respect what you say but if they disagree then they are going to tell you. You can have a debate and that’s okay as long as you are respectful.
But it is also important to me to get stuff done. It’s exciting seeing what you’ve been working on for the last six weeks come together and start to become something. When you achieve something, it makes all the bits that were confusing before tie together. We wrote a book! We created a whole new job for someone! We did important research!
I learned a lot about how research works in the real world with actual people and important social issues. The first project I did I learned everything as I was going along. It just started to make sense – it was like … “Oh okay, two weeks ago we thought of a question, and then we broke that down into five different questions and those questions have been answered by the people who filled in the survey and we’ve got some answers to the first question!” I learned how difficult some bits can be – like how some private schools and Catholic schools didn’t want to talk about certain topics. And then I learned about how important it is to get the survey out to as many different people as possible and to highlight what didn’t come up because that’s still just as interesting. I learned a lot about how to analyse what we found out. Analysis is something you’d think would be really boring but we did it in really fun ways so that it was memorable, like we had the data up all over the walls or had all the things people said all cut up and put them into different piles instead of just reading through them. I also learned a lot about how to run events – I feel like I could organise a whole festival from what I’ve learned! And I learned to ask for the things I needed – people are usually nice and help if they can.
By the end of the sex education project, our group had spent ages talking about sex education and learning from each other, but we also knew how much we weren’t taught in schools and how important it is that the education we get about sex is good. At the Conversation for Action, the adults agreed with pretty much everything we said. I feel like when we first sat down they probably thought, “This is just a thing that we have to do” but then when we started speaking they were like, “Oh they actually have real opinions that are just as good as ours.” It was nice to see them scribbling down when we were saying things, it was like, “Wow! They are actually taking notes on what we’re saying.”
And I grew in confidence in public speaking, which is just not a thing you get to do very often at that age unless you are head boy or head girl. I was doing it all the time, whether it was in a group of ten people organising an activity or actually doing the gatherings and conferences. Who speaks at a conference when they are 15? If you said to me now, “There’s a conference tomorrow could you come and speak?”, I’d check my shifts at work and be like, “Yeah let’s go, cool!” It’s crazy, young people so rarely get to present to adults and have them properly listening and I think that’s the main thing that has built my confidence a lot, that people actually listened to me.
I’m not so involved now because of work, but I know that it’s there and I could be involved. I got an email from one of the staff about a meeting and when I said I couldn’t go to the meeting she said, “Do you fancy catching up anyway?” and I was like, “Yes!” I always really loved those little personal emails when staff remember that we’ve been on holiday or remember we’ve had a test, it’s so nice. Even some of my friends won’t ask me like “How was that?” and then I get a wee email from YEA and it makes me happy.
I don’t see the other people who were involved every week any more, but we have a group chat and we all look after each other. There have been people who have been through big things and it was crazy how involved we all were. Like when Myada had really difficult things in her life and people were checking in and seeing what was happening. And obviously we knew that the staff were also checking in loads and that’s so nice to see. She’s my friend, and to see an adult who isn’t her mum or a parent taking care of her in the way I’d want her to be taken care of is so nice.
Now I’m 18 and pretty different to that shy 12-year-old. I’m confident in my actions and I’ve got a mind of my own – my mum might say too much of a mind of my own! I’m not smarter than other people who are 18 but I feel like I’ve got a better understanding of people. I know what words to use with what people and I kind of say things how they are rather than try to sugar-coat things. Now I know that my opinion is completely valid. I think that’s from being involved in YEA.
Christina’s story
This section of the chapter is a reflective piece based on my experiences as a participation worker. I worked at YEA from 2013 to 2019 as a participation worker and the project has a very special place in my heart. I have now moved on and work to promote young people’s participation in academic settings, including the TRIUMPH project with the University of Glasgow.3
I have framed my account through several snapshots of memories that stand out and, I judge, are illustrative of my time with the project.
Snapshot one
It is 2014. Six young people, and nine adults are sitting at a long board meeting table in Edinburgh City Chambers for the Sex Education Action Research Group’s Conversation for Action. We are surrounded by oil paintings, and the formality of the setting feels at odds with the conversation that we are having. The common theme of the meeting so far has been that young people aren’t receiving the level of sex education that the policies and guidelines say they should receive. I notice that every time a young person says “sex education” one of the adults around the table makes a point of saying “RSHP”4 in the next sentence as if to correct them. I take this to be a, probably, subconscious reminder to young people that they not using the correct language and are somehow less knowledgeable. It irritates me but I choose not to intervene and I am proud that the group don’t change their language in response.
One of the young people is describing how many of the toilets in her school don’t have sanitary bins. The most senior decision maker (one of only two men in the room) is visibly shocked and says, “Well, at least we can easily ensure that all girl’s toilets in our schools have sanitary bins.” I notice the relief on his face and the faces of others around the room, including, I imagine, my own. The issues discussed around the table have been complex and controversial; I would like an easy win, a clear outcome among other less measurable commitments. Opening up the conversation has been an achievement in itself but I worry that the young people might not see it like that; I want them to have a hook on which to hang the success of the group.
Katherine interrupts: “Not just the girls’ toilets.” The director looks confused and she goes on: “Some boys have periods too – what about trans men who still have vaginas?”
My colleague and I exchange a smile. My overwhelming feeling of pride in this young woman, who has spoken up in a formal group of adults and expressed her point so clearly, is only slightly tempered by the realisation that this was no longer going to be an easy win. I am also in awe of a 14-year-old girl who confidently uses the word ‘vagina’ to explain a point to a middle-aged man. I often find myself explaining how young people bring different perspectives and knowledge to discussions; in that moment, this truth entered the room for all to see.
Snapshot two
It’s 2017 and I’m working with a small group of young people, most of whom I know well. We are crowded into a small group-work room with glass walls and it is in the evening of what has already been a long day. I am leading a group-work activity where we brainstorm ideas and arrange them on a table-top diagram. Although the activity is finally going well, there is an edgy energy in the room. It has taken us a long time to get to the point of the activity; there was lots of chat and in-jokes from people in the room who know each other well, but I’m aware of a couple of new young people who might be intimidated by our familiarity.
Myada and Sue5 who have both been involved in the project for a long time are, for reasons unknown, snapping at each other. At first I think it is in fun, but after a few minutes I am not so sure; they are making pointed remarks towards each other that no longer feel entirely comfortable. I know that these two young women have very different communication styles and I also know that they both have a lot going on in their lives, but I don’t know how well they know each other and I wonder if there is a context of which I’m unaware.
Sue is talking a lot more than Myada and I worry that Myada is really upset. I am trying to keep the conversation light-hearted while wondering what is going on at home for her. Sue is talking loudly, repeating statements that she has been making for the past few minutes. I know – as do most of the group – that Sue is autistic. I am aware that she can get anxious in groups and that her communication style sometimes reflects this. I’m not remotely upset by either of the girls, but I am concerned about both of them and also concerned that their conversation is affecting the group dynamic. I need a bit of time to think. I want the group to refocus on the activity. And I’m tired.
I tell Sue to shut up.
I say it in a jokey way, but the moment the words have left my mouth I regret them. There is suddenly silence in the room and I feel everyone’s eyes on me. My colleague says, “You can’t say that!” and I’m not sure if she is shocked or amused or both. I apologise. I explain to the new group members that Sue knows me well, that she knows I don’t mean it seriously. Sue says that it is fine, and laughs, but I can see that she is taken aback.
My actions have disrupted the tension; the group refocuses and the activity continues successfully. I cannot, however, stop thinking about what I’ve said. I know that Sue finds it difficult to read appropriate behaviour and worries that she is annoying other people. I’m furious with myself for my unprofessional and unhelpful behaviour. Mostly I’m angry that I’ve upset a young person I genuinely care about. The glass walls of the room simultaneously feel oppressive and make me visible to the world outside the meeting.
We finish the meeting. The activity is successful, we end up with a table-top full of post-it notes jumbled together into some semblance of organisation. I join in with the chatter of conversation and busy-ness. We all go our own ways.
Later that evening I am still thinking about my comment and I text Sue an apology from my work phone. She replies immediately saying that it is okay, I was right, she was being annoying. I reply again saying that, even if she was, it wasn’t ok for me to say it. And then I return to the rest of my evening.
Snapshot three
It’s 2016 and a group of young people have organised an event to ensure that young people’s views are fed into a consultation about youth mental health services in the city.
The event is taking place at in a quirky venue with multiple room and activities. The whole place is decorated with fairy lights. In one room young people anonymously write their fears on balloons and let them float away to be collected and recorded later. In another room young people attend a workshop about teenage psychology. In another room young people answer survey questions as they cycle on a bike that powers a smoothie maker. Another room houses a marketplace of services that young people might like to know about. Another room is a chill-out space with music and beanbags (the group was very specific that there needed to be beanbags). There are also multiple other rooms.
Over 120 young people pass through the event. If they take part in all of the activities (and therefore answer all the consultation questions), they get a free burrito. The event has been entirely planned, advertised and run by young people. It is the culmination of six months of weekly meetings – although we all know that there will be more work to compile and analyse all of the data that we are collecting.
My role is simply to ensure that everyone gets the burrito that they want.
Discussion
After writing and editing our stories, we (Christina, Katherine and Myada) met to discuss the similarities and differences in our stories and the most important aspects of our experiences that we wanted to highlight. In this short discussion section, we discuss two themes that feel important to us and are also reflected in the academic literature: the importance of relationships in young people’s participation and the concept of ‘space’ in young people’s participation.
Relationships
In the (not so) ‘new sociology of childhood’, James and Prout (1997) trace the emergence of a new paradigm of thought that moves away from a focus on childhood and young people as an apprenticeship for adulthood and children and young people as future adults (‘becomings’) to children as active agents in their own lives (‘beings’). However, Prout (2005) subsequently points out that being/becoming is a false dichotomy since all humans (of any age) are constantly and simultaneously both being and becoming. Others have argued that the focus on being and becoming centres on the individual child or young person without taking full account of the context within which the child or young person lives and the relationships that are important in their life (Tisdall and Punch, 2012). This need to consider children’s social relationships has led to some researchers moving beyond the duality of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ to an extended typology that includes ‘being’, ‘becoming’ and ‘belonging’ (Haw, 2010; Sumsion and Wong, 2011).
It is clear within all three stories that a feeling of ‘belonging’ was important to our experiences with Young Edinburgh Action. In conversations about what ‘belonging’ feels like, we used the word community. Even though the young people involved might have different opinions and different ways of communicating, they all want to find a way to relate to each other because they have chosen to be there and value YEA. For Katherine and Myada, it is also important that they feel that they are part of the YEA community, even during periods of time when they are not going to meetings.
Relationships of many different variations underpin all three stories. Peer relationships were important for both Katherine and Myada, who state that they might not have stayed involved in the project in the early days of their involvement if they hadn’t met other interesting young people and started to build friendships. Subsequently both of them describe how friendships forged in YEA have extended beyond the project and provide ongoing support, both practical and emotional, in other areas of their lives. However, peer relationships are not always positive. Although they chose not to include them in their stories, all three authors were able to identify challenging peer relationships that, at least for short periods of time, had a negative impact on their engagement with YEA.
It is clear from all three stories that relationships between young people and staff both are important and, at times, challenging. When discussing our stories, Myada and Katherine both said that this relationship was important because they were not used to feeling comfortable with adults who were not a part of their family. Young people appreciate the informality of their relationships with YEA staff and the genuine care and support that they receive from staff. However, as her second snapshot illustrates, Christina is constantly negotiating the boundaries of relationships with young people and sometimes not getting it right. Relationships don’t happen between young people and staff but between a particular young person and a particular adult; Christina’s relationship with Myada is different from her relationship with Katherine or from her relationship with a young person who has only recently become involved with the project.
Le Borgne (2017) and Le Borgne and Tisdall (2017) emphasise the important role of the participation worker in youth participation projects, but this role is often missed out of the literature, which tends to focus on the process and the outcomes of participation projects. Myada and Katherine both, however, emphasise the importance of this role. Both describe how the relationship built moves beyond the specific participation projects – Myada saying how YEA staff were the ideal people to support her through difficult times because they already knew her story, Katherine emphasising how little things such as asking how a test went are important.
In their discussion about the three stories, Katherine and Myada discussed how their relationship with Christina made it easier for them to do things that they might otherwise not be able to do, such as speaking at a conference or writing this chapter. They described how their relationships with YEA staff made it easier for them to feel comfortable with other adults in a predominantly adult setting; knowing that they are with someone they trust makes it easier to take risks. However, Myada’s story illustrates that the participation worker also occupies a space in between young people and other adults in their life that might not be so positive; the personal learning and development that she believed to be a positive outcome from her time with YEA was often viewed as problematic by her parents.
In her second snapshot Christina seeks to demonstrate the thought processes that go into a group session that might appear to an onlooker as relatively fun and easy. Interestingly, when discussing the stories for this chapter, Myada could not remember the incident. Christina also asked the other young woman involved to read the snapshot and discussed whether she was happy for us to include it in the chapter. She was happy for it to be included but was sad that the incident had caused Christina to worry and gave some personal background to the situation that gave Christina more insight. The process of building relationships and of negotiating the role of the participation worker is always ongoing.
While the subject of relationships between staff was not explored in the stories, these are also important. Christina notes that, in parallel with relationships between young people that extend beyond the project, although she no longer works with YEA she is still close friends with many of the colleagues she worked with on the project.
Space
The development of the YEA model was particularly informed by an article by Barry Percy-Smith (2010), who states that ‘participation is influenced by the nature of the spaces in which it happens’ (Percy-Smith, 2010, p 109) and argues for a need to rethink participation in terms of creating spaces for effective youth participation. Percy-Smith also talks about participative spaces as sites of social learning and advocates for widening the focus away from decision-making structures (see also Chapter 16 in this book).
YEA indicated a move away from a more structured approach to youth participation towards an approach that prioritised creating spaces for young people to identify and explore issues that they think are important. Katherine and Myada both use the phrase “safe space” to describe their experience of YEA and credited these safe spaces with supporting their own personal journey of developing their own identify, interests and values. They emphasise how the most important things that happened in these spaces were not always the planned activities but, instead, the times when conversations went off on tangents. Myada and Katherine describe how the freedom to let the conversation stray from a set programme and be led by the interests of the young people offers opportunities for them to learn and reflect together, to strengthen their bond as a group, to develop their sense of self in the world and practice self-determination in a safe and supportive group. Myada says that “tangents are where we find our passions”.
Such willingness to allow meandering tangents also challenges the power dynamic between adults and young people. In the longer version of Myada’s story, before it was edited to fit this chapter, she described one action research group where young people were constantly distracted. She knew that staff were frustrated because the group wasn’t making ‘progress’ but still let them explore their own ideas and conversations. While young people’s priority is more often the relationships and the opportunities for personal learning and growth, decision makers and managers almost always see relationships as a means to achieve the desired outcome of young people influencing decisions made. The participation worker often occupies a space in between these different priorities, sometimes pushing young people to stay focused on a task at hand, sometimes persuading adults that time spent doing activities that do not directly or obviously contribute to a project’s outcomes are still valuable. There is, therefore, an ongoing complex dance between tangents and structure, young people and staff, process and outcomes. While young people working with YEA often described the project as ‘youth led’, Christina would describe it as a partnership between young people and adults where power is openly negotiated and shared in different measures at different times.
Conclusion
In theorising about youth participation, it can be easy to forget that the people interacting with the projects are humans who affect and are affected by each other and by the work in multiple and complex ways. These three stories tell about very different and yet intertwined experiences with a youth participation project. We make no claims that our stories are representative of experiences in participation projects generally, or indeed of experiences with YEA specifically. Rather we believe that starting with our experience can be a useful entry point to thinking about youth participation and, in particular, the importance of relationships and positive spaces that support young people in participation projects.
Notes
1Certain sections and details have been removed for ethical reasons.
2The action research group looking at gender equality published a children’s storybook called Alex and Charlie challenging gender stereotypes. For more information, see https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/learning-publications/alex-charlie?documentId=11922&categoryId=20264
3 http://triumph.sphsu.gla.ac.uk/young-people
4An abbreviation for ‘relationships, sexual health, parenting’ education.
5The name Sue is a pseudonym and this snapshot has been discussed with both young women concerned.
References
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James, A. and Prout, A. (1997) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Childhood, London: Routledge.
Le Borgne, C. (2017) Implementing Children and Young People’s Participation in Decision-Making: The Role of Non-Governmental Organisations, Centre for Research on Children and Families Briefing 87, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh. Available from: https://era.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/21025
Le Borgne, C. and Tisdall, E.K.M. (2017) ‘Children’s participation: questioning competence and competencies?’, Social Inclusion, 5(3): 122–30.
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Tisdall, K. and Punch, S. (2012) ‘Not so “new”? Looking critically at childhood studies’, Children’s Geographies, 10(3): 249–64.
