Young People’s Participation. Группа авторов
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