Although the role of youth work is increasingly important for community development, youth workers face important challenges in terms of credibility of their work and, consequently, in terms of finding funding and sustainable ways to pursue and achieve their goals for their target groups. In this article we are aiming to raise awareness about the fact that the non-formal approach used in youth work is structured, its techniques have empirical backup and, if done right, it develops key skills and competences in youth in an engaging way.
We are aiming to present youth work as complementary to formal education and to emphasize how it creates a learning arena for youngsters involved in the process. We will discuss how the physical environment is connected to learning, as well as how paying attention to the psychological environment can greatly enhance the learning experience, and how we play with these two key aspects in youth work. The physical environment will be explored by considering how indoor and outdoor spaces can serve specific purposes of the learning process. The psychological environment part will include team building and group dynamics, how we work with motivation and how we can create a supportive and safe context which will lead to a “community of learners”.
1. The Physical Environment in Youth Work
The physical environment where non-formal activities take place plays a key role in inducing a feeling of belonging to the group. The key feature of the physical environment in youth work is that is co-created by the members of the group. It has been suggested by research that personalised spaces that give people a feeling of belonging increase team performance compared to neutral, anonymous spaces (Greenaway et al., 2016).
In addition, youth work takes place in a variety of environments, both indoors and outdoors. Indoors, the room is usually arranged informally, chairs in a circle rather than on rows, to encourage collaboration and exchange of ideas during the learning activities. The key idea is for everyone to feel comfortable – learners sometimes choose to sit on the floor or anywhere else in the room. Also, during group activities, each group gets to choose where they want to work, so they can change environment if needed.
Because the learning process is not seen as one directional from the ‘instructor’ to the learners, but also vice versa and, importantly, between learners as well, the physical environment should facilitate this. Practically speaking, the furniture should be easy to move around so learners could sit together in small/larger groups.
Outdoor spaces offer unlimited potential for education: non-formal education encompasses under its umbrella outdoors education which comes from direct interaction with the nature and open spaces, be it living in the nature, hiking, short walks or study visits. I would very much like to cite two participants in an outdoors project I organised with an international team of youth workers:
“When I don’t have a roof above my head, neither do my ideas have a roof, I feel free in how I think.” (Louise, Denmark)
“Into the forest I go to lose myself and find my soul.” (Pison, Norway).
They basically capture the essence of why using outdoor spaces as learning environments can be highly beneficial for some topics (e.g., sustainability- or environment-related topics can be explored really well while spending time in nature), particularly if we want a group of learners to think creatively, outside the box (maybe actually being outside a box – i.e., room – helps with that). From experience, living together outside for a few days triggers different group dynamics, with people being more likely to trust each other faster, to rely on the group and to get a sense of belonging. This could potentially be because of the vulnerability feeling everyone gets when they are alone compared to the comforting feeling when they are with the group: being outdoors raises challenges that people are not normally used to solve by themselves (unless highly trained in survival techniques) and this makes everyone more reliant on the group but also more supportive for the others. Also, being close to the nature makes people behave more naturally and be more authentic.
2. The Psychological Environment in Youth Work
“Learners in supportive environments have high levels of self-efficacy and selfmotivation and use learning as a primary transformative force.” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1989)
I would like to mention this quote because it is summing up so nicely the core idea behind the ideal psychological learning environment. In non-formal education, we spend quite a lot of time to build a supportive and safe environment in which learners feel their opinion is valued, where there are no wrong questions and it is totally fine to be different. Regardless of the topic, we spend ~20% of the time of an activity (1 day from a 5-day training, for instance) to build the team: we create space for learners to discover each other at a more personal level, to engage in meaningful conversations and to share their vulnerabilities to some extent. We also include a team building activity in which learners get to understand their place in the group and get some insight into the group dynamics. Particularly we discuss about how they perceive the group and what they could improve in how they interact.
There are quite a few models of team development, probably the most famous being Tuckman’s (1965) model of forming-storming-norming-performing. We also find the Drexler/Sibbet model potentially useful. These are trying to describe in theoretical frameworks how teams form and develop throughout time. In youth work, depending on the length of projects, size of groups and other factors, we try to create the context for teams to form and work together efficiently. We assist the process of team development, paying attention to group dynamics and needs. Although reality is not always directly reflecting the theoretical models (which do not have massive
empirical support given the complexities of human interactions in a team) we consider that as youth workers we should be play an active and supportive role in the creation of teams and we should give the groups of learners time to understand how they work best. Monitoring of group dynamics and supporting effective conflict management are also important in order to achieve good performance and also group satisfaction with the process.
2.a. Attention span
The attention span is a concept describing for how long a person can focus on a single activity or task without getting distracted. Of course, it varies from individual to individual and it also depends a lot on the context (e.g., if there is a social situation, if the activity is engaging or not). The popular view is that adults have an attention span of ~20 minutes and children can focus on the same task for ~their age in minutes. However, research looking at the validity of actual empirical evidence for attention span is actually putting things into a different perspective and emphasizes, among other observations, that engaging learners in the process, changing pace, style or even the person delivering a set of materials can maintain attention for as long as 50-60 minutes (Bradbury, 2016).
So, as everything else involved in the learning process, the story of attention span is not less complicated. But active learning is brought again into discussion and planning a learning session with a focus on how to capture and maintain attention seems to be one of the key paths towards an active group of learners. Importantly, Bradbury (2016) also mentions that attention is related to motivation and arousal – two factors that could be measured more objectively. Arousal is the level of excitement of individuals, how stimulated/awake they are and is directly associated with heart beat. Motivation is another interesting component which deserves some attention.
2.b. Motivation, failures and feedback
In youth work we focus a lot on learners’ motivation in terms of identifying it from the beginning (i.e., we always ask people WHY they are in the room: expectations and how they are aiming to contribute to the learning process) and discussing it with the whole group so everyone gets a sense of the group motivation. We also use this as a feedback for facilitators to potentially tweak the sessions in order to respond to learners’ needs – when planning the content of non-formal learning sessions we always need to allow some level of flexibility so we can tailor the content to the group needs (within appropriate limits). This works hand in hand with maintaining motivation throughout the sessions: you feel like you are in a place where you want to be and you know that your learning needs are listened and responded to, which makes you more motivated to engage.
Motivation (particularly maintaining it) is related to rewards which can take the shape of positive, constructive feedback. In youth work, we pay attention to how and when we give feedback for learners’ performance. The aim is for them to understand what they should keep doing and what they seem to be good at, but also to realise which are the areas for improvement. Importantly, in youth work we do not work a lot with right or wrong answers and there is almost never one single way to do things (similar to how life works, ha?).
It is always important to create a safe space for the learners to experiment with their ideas and to fail in order to learn – we consider failures as opportunities to learn and we value them because they are an indication that learners are trying something outside of their comfort zone, they are an indication of willingness to grow. It is universally true that we cannot get things right from the first try and that success is actually built on multiple failures from which we learn – so this is one of the central beliefs in youth work. We create a safe learning environment not in the sense that learners cannot fail, but that they feel ok not to get it right from the first try and are motivated to try again based on the feedback received in order to improve.
2.c. Reflection
Given the experiential learning approach taken in youth work, we find that the learning process is enhanced by reflection after activities. As mentioned above, we first create a safe space for learners to try out and experiment with their ideas individually or in groups, then they take action and return to the safe context to share their experience of success or failure and they receive feedback. An important part of the process is the reflection (or reflective thinking) which is guided by specific questions (e.g., What went well? What didn’t go as planned? What did you discover in the process? How did you feel? What will you do differently next time? What do you still don’t know? What’s the take-home message from the experience?) and encourages the learners to think back at their experience offering closure to the learning process and a new and clear foundation for the next trials.
Research is not clear in terms of the universal benefits of reflection in the learning process; nonetheless, a review of literature on the topic concludes that when used as a learning strategy, reflection can offer learners the chance to actually connect their existing knowledge with new information and to acknowledge the affective side of the learning process (Mann et al., 2009). This is specifically how reflection is used in youth work: as a guided process, with a focus on forming connections between the existing foundation and the new information acquired through the learning experience. Also, we consider important for learners to understand the gaps in their knowledge so they can address these – having a reflection at the end of an activity/learning process actually provides the space to establish the limits within which the learner operates and where they need to be pushed and where they might need to seek help.
Concluding remarks
The article is aiming to present a view of how youth work creates a learning arena for young people to develop personally and professionally. The physical and psychological environment we create are both important for the learning experience. In terms of physical environments we use a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces: on one hand, if we are talking about indoors we have a focus on the co-creation of the space so the learners develop a sense of ownership/belonging to the space, on the other hand, outdoors offer unlimited potential for creative activities and team building.
In terms of the psychological aspects of the learning environment in youth work, there is an emphasis on team work, on how we can facilitate the team development and how to support effective conflict management. We also aim to create safe spaces for learners to experiment with ideas, to share experiences, to fail and to receive feedback. We work closely with learners’ motivation by acknowledging it and using different tools to maintain it throughout the activities. In addition, youth work uses guided reflection as a learning strategy to think back at a specific experience and to connect existing knowledge with newly acquired information.
This article has been created within the frame of “PiFbase International”, a KA2 strategic partnership for innovation between 3 youth NGOs in Sweden (Awesome People), Finland (Innola) and Romania (Un strop de fericire), funded by Erasmus+. Our aim is to improve the quality of youth work, using coaching as a tool to reach under represented groups of youngsters and to develop their social entrepreneurship skills.
Author of the article
Carmen F. Ionita, MSc
PhD student in Psychology at the University of Manchester
International Project Manager at “Un Strop de Fericire”
Contact: carmen-ionita@hotmail.com
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