Observing Youth (My first Anthropology essay)

One note before the text

This is my first Anthropology essay. It was a formative assessment so I didn’t get a mark on it, I just got feedback. 

While it’s a good piece of writing, it’s not really Anthropological, it’s more Literary. Of course, this makes sense, given that’s what I studied for the past three years. How do they differ? In Literature, we read a text, we match a theory to it, and then we write about all the ins and outs of how that theory applies to it. We have to explain a lot, interpret, analyse, and break everything down into little bits and pieces. In Anthropology, you work with people. Words are taken for what they are - this is what my participant said and this is what they meant by it. My role is to take those words and put them in context. 

Let’s take my essay question and compare my original introduction with the more Anthropological one.

Essay question 6. Why might thinking through lived experience help us gain new insights into perennial social issues?

In Literature we would say (as I initially said):
    In this essay, I discuss prejudice against youth as a perennial social issue and use examples from practice to show how offering them opportunities that reflect their needs and wants can be a valuable step in their development.

→ this implies that I’ll be proving that prejudice against youth is a perennial social issue, take the reader through a few thoroughly analysed examples of why it’s important to give young people the right opportunities, explain what changes when we observe then in that context, and conclude.

In Anthropology we would say (as you’ll see in the essay below):
    In this essay, I discuss why it is important to spend real time with young people and observe them as they develop in a space where they are offered opportunities that reflect their needs and wants. Doing so will help us gain new insights into the prejudice against youth, a perennial social issue that they often face. 

→ here we already know that prejudice against youth is a perennial social issue and all I have to do is explain why it’s important to observe young people in context. Through (the same) stories and examples, I am building towards a theoretical bit that puts things in context and conclude.

The essay you will see below is partly edited in line with the feedback I received. Overall, the text had everything it needed from the very beginning, what I didn’t quite get were the framing and the focus. 

- The essay starts here -

Observing Youth

Lived experience insights into the development of young people

Labelled as inexperienced, reckless, lazy, or irresponsible, young people are often excluded from decision-making processes directly or indirectly and their opportunities to exercise their agency are limited, stuck in a liminal space between childhood and adulthood. Resistance to engaging with the formal educational system is seen as laziness, while some extracurricular activities are considered to be a waste of time. However, flipping this narrative and allowing young people to experiment and challenge norms and expectations, shows their potential to be excellent creative innovators and become active citizens in their communities. In this essay, I discuss why it is important to spend real time with young people and observe them as they develop in a space where they are offered opportunities that reflect their needs and wants. Doing so will help us gain new insights into the prejudice against youth, a perennial social issue that they often face.

A few days ago, I posted a story on my Instagram page, asking young people to tell me if they were ever dismissed simply because of their age. Below are the stories of four young people aged between sixteen and twenty.

A has recently taken on a sport. They started working with an amateur trainer, but after a while, they decided to take it to the next level and attend competitions. A has done the research and found a professional trainer in their town. The amateur trainer and older trainees from his team are telling A that they made the wrong decision and that, as a young person, they should listen to adults.

At school, B easily gets distracted. They are struggling to understand why any of the information that they’re being taught is useful, especially as the teachers don’t seem too excited about their lessons either. B often forgets to do their homework and studies late at night, usually on the day before a test. B’s parents are at work most of the day and don’t know much about B’s preoccupations. Occasionally, they tell them that they’re a lazy and irresponsible teenager.

Over the summer, C wanted to get a part-time job. They love reading and have been running an informal book club with some friends, so they apply for an entry-level role at their local library as a ‘reading buddy’. After the interview, C is told that they are too young and couldn’t possibly have enough experience or skills for the role.

D signed up for a first aid course. During the training, they are told that they should expect people to tell them that they don’t want help from a youth. Even though most participants are under twenty, adults often dismiss them by saying they’re just playing rescuer. D’s parents are also telling them that the course is a waste of time.

It could be argued that the stories above are isolated incidents. However, the prejudice against young people can be seen in media and policymaking, which evidences how common it is. Andy Furlong (2009) emphasises that media headlines about the younger generations are ‘rarely positive; young people’s activities are frequently portrayed as distasteful, dangerous or threatening and as signalling a decline in moral standards’ (Furlong, p. 258). Ginwright et al. (2005) explain how some of these labels are reflected in policymaking and ‘offers a comprehensive analysis of the social and economic conditions that impede young people's healthy development’ (Ginwright et al., p. 25).

First, we argue that the current wave of policy directed at youth renders them second-class citizens who are prevented from full democratic participation. Second, we offer a critique of existing conceptual frameworks for youth development, which we call the problem-driven and the possibility-driven approaches. The problem-driven approach treats urban youth as threats to civil society, while the possibility-driven perspective views young people as passive consumers of civic life. Both frameworks obscure more than they explain youth's experiences in society. (Ginwright et al., p. 25)

These incorrectly framed policies trap young people in a vicious cycle - they are seen as irresponsible, they are not given the opportunity to participate in decision-making or exercise their agency, they respond to this by resisting the structures they have been forced into, which makes them seem irresponsible. It is also worth considering why these prejudices exist. There is a clear disconnect between policymakers and the grassroots reality especially when it comes to youth where development happens over a longer period of time with subtle changes that are hard to quantify on a universal scale.

I will offer my own development story as an example of a medium to long-term process.

Bea and one of her friends are both musicians. They hear about a live music event and they go together to check it out. They enjoy it and a few days later one of the youth workers invites them to come to their local youth centre and get involved in a few more upcoming performances. They go and during the first meeting, the group of young people picks a setlist together and for a few weeks, they go to the youth centre regularly for rehearsals. The events turn out great and the people at the youth centre are nice, so Bea decides to become a volunteer.

A few months pass and one of the youth workers asks the team to come up with a few ideas for regular events that could happen over the winter period at the youth centre. They are also told that they will be responsible to promote and organise the events as a team with, of course, the youth workers’ help should they feel necessary.

The youth centre is the Baia Mare Youth Centre from Romania, an open-access space owned by the local authority and managed by DEIS, a non-profit organisation run by youth workers. An important aspect of this and other open-access areas is that it allows young people to ‘borrow ownership in a protective way’ (Childress, p. 199), creating a safe space that empowers them and enables them to participate and co-create projects based on their needs and wants.

In my story, the youth worker gave young people an opportunity to climb higher on Hart’s ladder of participation (see Fig. 1) onto step 6. Adult-initiated, shared decisions with young people.

Fig. 1

Agency is placed in the hands of young people and they are given the freedom to do whatever they think they can implement and would work for their peers. The ideas generated by the volunteers come from internal motivation, rather than being forced to do something, hence they are more likely to get involved and stay committed.

In January 2017, the group of volunteers at the Baia Mare Youth Centre came up with three events: a board games evening, jamming sessions, and a karaoke night. The youth worker helped them identify the various tasks involved in organising the events and then the team distributed the work among themselves. The events went well, raising the visibility of the youth centre in the local community, and continued weekly until early March when the team had to shift their focus toward other projects. As time passed, within the next twelve months, the young volunteers reached step 7 with two youth-initiated projects - a public consultation on the issues confronted by adolescents and a concert in the youth centre’s garden - and then step 8 when the city was named Romania’s Youth Capital for a year. All the young people involved in this series of experiences proved that they are capable of making good decisions for themselves as well as their communities, they showed commitment and enthusiasm and proved that they can make an impact in society. Moreover,

…learning in non-formal settings (for example, paid work in workplaces, in leisure pursuits, engaging in cultural activities and in voluntary work) is [also] valued by young people because, unlike formal education, it equips them to engage with immediate issues and rehearses the exercise of choice and decision-making. (Wyn, p. 103, my emphasis)

This makes it more appealing for young people as they can easily see the applicability of the competencies that they are gaining. It is also important that by doing things out of inner motivation, their development is self-driven and when they experience the success of their own work, it encourages them to continue to do what is meaningful for themselves.

Especially as during adolescence ‘the peer group becomes more prominent’ (Bassani, p. 76), young people will feel most comfortable around their peers, in an open youth-centred setting, so observing them in a space where they can freely exercise their agency would be more conclusive than trying to draw conclusions based on their interactions in a formal education setting that is strictly supervised. Bucholtz (2002) points out that ‘research has usually approached adolescence from the perspective of adulthood, downplaying youth-centered interaction and cultural production in favor of an emphasis on the transition to adulthood’ (Bucholtz, p. 525), which strengthens the misconception that young people are just under-developed adults, inexperienced, and incapable of functioning in society. Instead, Julkunen (2009) explains that

young people both react to and act upon societal structures. [...] Young people learn from each other, they interact with each other and they develop new activities that help them overcome various obstacles and resolve some of the contradictions which arise from societal conditions. (Julkunen, p. 162)

Looking at adolescence as a fully developed rather than a transitional stage in a person’s life would allow research, media, policymakers, and the general public to readdress the ever-repeating misconceptions about the younger generations and stop demonising them. One way to do this would be to put more emphasis on the lived experience of young people and youth workers which will further create an opportunity to observe the entire youth development process.

It is important to note the context in which these observations are made. For example, young people in 2017 had a much smoother transition from childhood into adolescence, following a relatively predictable pattern. Unlike them, today’s generation of teenagers emerged from a global pandemic that caused them to miss out on socialisation with their peers, building relationships, and generally exploring independence, so before they could start climbing the ladder, they needed the time to ground themselves which is a natural response to their newly discovered freedom, so putting them under a magnifying glass right now, could lead to an incomplete conclusion.

Research concerning young people would need to take into consideration a longer period of experiences, as changes may seem unimportant at first despite being a step in a larger process. The stereotypes around young people have emerged from observing them in an incorrect context or at an incorrect time, and therefore to break them down the focus needs to be shifted onto the spaces in which young people can flourish.

Bibliography

Bassani, Cherylynn, ‘Young people and social capital’, in Andy Furlong, ed., Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood, Routledge, 2009, pp. 74 - 80

Bucholtz, Mary, ‘Youth and Cultural Practice’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 31 (2002), pp. 525 - 552

Childress, Herb, ‘Teenagers, Territory and the Appropriation of Space’, Childhood, vol. 11 (2004), pp. 195 - 205

Furlong, Andy, ‘Young people, culture and lifestyles’, in Andy Furlong, ed., Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood, Routledge, 2009, pp. 241 - 242

Ginwright, Shawn, Julio Cammarota, Pedro Noguera, ‘Youth, Social Justice, and Communities: Toward a Theory of Urban Youth Policy’, Social Justice, vol. 32 (2005), pp. 24 - 40

Julkunen, Illse, ‘Youth unemployment and marginalization’, in Andy Furlong, ed., Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood, Routledge, 2009, pp. 157 - 166

Wyn, Johanna, ‘Educating for late modernity’, in Andy Furlong, ed., Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood, Routledge, 2009, pp. 97 - 104

Fig. 1: Hart’s Ladder of Participation, https://360participation.com/models-of-participation/ (accessed 12/11/2022)