Untangling the conflation of ‘young adults’ and ‘young people’ in STI and sexual health policy and sex education

Young adults, aged 18–30 years, are disproportionally mentioned in sexually transmissible infection surveillance data both in Australia and internationally. This contributes to categorising young adults as an ‘at risk’ group in health policy. How young adults are framed in policy, and what informs this, have direct implications for policy priorities and responses, including the development of health promotion programmes. In this paper, we provide a case study of Australia’s National Strategies for Blood Borne Viruses and Sexually Transmissible Infections from 2005 to 2017. We identify how ‘young adults’ as a population are masked by, and subsumed within, the broader category of ‘young people’ within these strategies. As a result, young adults become framed by default as a ‘risk category’ that requires education to correct its deficits, regardless of personal experience. For health promotion to advocate, mediate and enable better sexual health outcomes, a policy environment is needed that reflects the changing social and cultural contexts and sexual independence that young adults experience. Sexual health policies should reflect the complexity and opportunities of young adulthood if we are to offer an enabling policy environment for innovative and nuanced health promotion strategies, including adult appropriate health education.     

Measuring children and young people’s wellbeing in the school context

Although being rooted in the work of ancient Greek philosophers, contemporary research on wellbeing is a relatively new phenomenon. As a term in the literature, wellbeing is often used interchangeably with others, such as happiness, flourishing, enjoying a good life and life satisfaction. Furthermore, the wellbeing of school-aged children is only beginning to be explored with increasing recognition that research conducted on adults cannot be uncritically applied to children and young people. This paper aims to address some of the complexities in conceptualising, and hence assessing, children and young people’s wellbeing by drawing on a recently completed study examining the role of creative initiatives in fostering wellbeing. The new instrument that was developed to capture children and young people’s perceptions of their wellbeing in school is outlined. Data are presented from a survey of 5170 students from 20 primary and 20 secondary schools across England that identify four dimensions of wellbeing. Differences in self-reported wellbeing relating to age, gender and type of school attended (Creative Partnerships versus other schools) are explored. The implications of these findings, particularly differences related to type of school attended, given the focus of this special issue, are considered.     

Heroes and villains: the insistence of the imaginary and the novice teacher’s need to believe

This paper stems from research in Australia examining pre-service teacher and mentor teacher experiences on the practicum. The paper focuses on findings from the research, highlighting the tendency among the pre-service teachers to either valorise or demonise their mentor teachers, reflective of what we describe, following Kristeva and Britzman, as their powerful need to believe. The paper draws on psychoanalytic theory in order gain insights into this process, viewing the pre-service teachers’ accounts of their mentors as fantasies that serve a stabilising function in order to manage the intense emotional demands of schools and classrooms. The paper concludes with considerations of how teacher educators might ameliorate the ideality of novice teachers, reflecting the insistence of the imaginary, and hence enable them to benefit more from the practicum experience. We briefly suggest the use of tools that work within the symbolic register to exercise a mediating role in the context of these intense demands.     

‘Participatory parity’, young people and policy in Scotland

The last three decades have witnessed significant changes in the social and economic context of young people’s lives. There is increasing evidence that for young people growing up in the UK, this is fuelling a disparity between those with resources and those without. What this means in terms of social justice, however, is difficult to discern. In Scotland, promoting greater social justice so that all its citizens are included has been held up as a key vision of successive Scottish administrations since devolution began in 1999. Scotland therefore makes an interesting case for the examination of policy discourses in relation to young people. In order to do this, the paper draws on a theoretical framework of justice developed by Nancy Fraser which is oriented on the norm of participatory parity. Combining this framework with an approach informed by critical discourse analysis, the current policy context in Scotland is examined in order to discern if it contributes to all young people achieving participatory parity and subsequently social justice.     

How does homework ‘work’ for young children? Children’s accounts of homework in their everyday lives

Homework is an increasing yet under-researched part of young children’s everyday lives. Framed by the international agendas of starting strong and school accountability, homework in the lives of young children has been either overlooked or considered from the perspective of adults rather than from the perspective of children themselves. This paper redresses this situation by reporting on an Australian study of 120 young children, aged four to eight years, where homework emerges as a key part of their everyday lives. Children’s own accounts of their everyday decision-making, using audio-taped conversations and concurrent paper-based timeline activities, show homework as accomplishing the institutional purposes of the school, while affording the children opportunities to demonstrate their competence in operating in an adult-generated education regime.     

‘Voice’, young people and action research

This article moves from an overview of what is meant by the term ‘voice’ to discussing the significance of its links with action research. It does this through using a simple typology of three types of voice: Authoritative, Critical and Therapeutic. Each type of voice represents a different process of articulation and intended outcome. It then moves on to consider ‘voice’ and the collaboration of young people in educational action research by unpicking a series of four assumptions which delineate major theoretical and practical possibilities and limitations. These assumptions provide a critique of the underpinning ideologies held by professionals when supporting and listening to young people     

Dutch children and their ‘God’: the development of the ‘God’ concept among indigenous and immigrant children in the Netherlands

In the 1980s and 1990s in the Netherlands, as a reaction to the growing number of non‐Christian pupils at Christian schools, religious education and religious development became issues for debate. At some schools, it was the exclusiveness of the Christian tradition that dominated, and at others it was the inclusiveness. Another group specialised in inter‐religious dialogue. Our research studied the religious development of pupils from two primary schools. One is the first and only inter‐religious primary school in the Netherlands, the Juliana van Stolberg primary school. The other is a Christian school, the Prinses Margriet primary school that educates pupils exclusively in the Christian tradition. The research questions focussed on the development of the ‘God’ concept of children confronted with stories from different religious traditions. The ‘God’ concept is seen in our research as a concept that develops in an inductive way from the data. This way of conceptualising ‘development’ is coined as the prospective perspective on development. The results of this comparative research led to the tentative conclusion that pupils in our research population who were involved in inter‐religious learning, demonstrate explorative behaviour concerning their own religion and that of others. Their ‘God’ concept shows hybrid characteristics. These pupils are rooted in their own tradition, and at the same time they are ‘on the move’. This offers points of departure for the development of citizens articulating their commitments and turning imminent conflicts into inter‐religious encounters.     

Imagining a different life in school: educating student teachers about ‘looked after’ children and young people

The research described in this paper concerns the acquaintance of student teachers with the educational and wider pastoral experiences of children and young people who are or have been ‘looked after’ and who they may well teach at some point, together with the familiarisation of student teachers with the ‘looked after’ system in the UK. We discuss an exploratory awareness‐raising curriculum project within a Teacher Education Department at a University in the UK that utilises digital multimedia to develop a ‘community of awareness’ of young people and student teachers. As a result of this work, the student teachers were able to reflect on their pedagogical knowledge and practices related to teaching and wider pupil pastoral care. Further, those involved in the project therefore not only learned how to use technology, but to apply it in meaningful, productive ways, which were potentially transforming in terms of appreciation and knowledge of diversity. Benefits for the participants – the young people involved and the student teachers, as well as implications for both student teachers’ understanding of diversity and limitations of the technology – are discussed.     

Their fault or ours?: The contraction of work and the ‘radicalisation’ of young people

This paper examines two commonly held views of young people in relation to work and employment. The first has a low estimation of the capacities of young people, placing the blame for the lack of job prospects on young people themselves. The second places more emphasis on the lack of opportunities available to the young and sees young people as a new radical force in society, with rising levels of unemployment leading to their radicalisation. Evidence from a study of pupils in their last year of compulsory schooling suggests that both of these views are inadequate. Young people do not lack knowledge of, or interest in the world of work, neither does the growing level of unemployment seem to be generating increasingly negative and hostile attitudes to education and government schemes such as the YTS.     

‘It was as useful as a chocolate kettle’: sex education in the lives of same‐sex‐attracted young people in Australia

Sex education is a contested site in the school curriculum as communities grapple with who should teach young people about sex and how it should be taught. In this paper we ask whether same‐sex‐attracted young people are being exposed to appropriate and relevant sex education at school, and if they are not whether it is necessary that sex education be inclusive of sexual difference. In the second Australian survey of 1749 same‐sex‐attracted youth of 14–21 years old, we ask young people about sex education classes at school, how useful they were for them, their sources of information regarding gay and lesbian relationships and safe sex, sexual behaviours and incidence of sexually transmissible infections and pregnancy. We find from the data that most of these young people found sex education to be useless because it was not inclusive. In comparison with normative studies, these young people were, on average, sexually active earlier, had higher rates of diagnosed sexually transmissible infections and at least as high an incidence of pregnancy. We conclude from the data that there is a need for sex education in schools to be inclusive of the sexuality of all students, not just those who are attracted to the opposite sex.     

Bringing the jellyfish home: environmental consciousness and ‘sense of wonder’ in young children’s encounters with natural landscapes and places

The over-arching aim of this study was to elucidate and interpret topics that are relevant to how we understand children’s experiences and creation of meaning in natural landscapes and places within these landscapes. Following two nature-kindergarten groups regularly over ten months, the data for this ethnographic study consist of constructed narratives and narrative maps. Key topics relate to children’s multi-sensory experiences and the development of environmental consciousness, and their ‘sense of wonder’ as a driving force for exploration, interpretation and creation of meaning. Implications of the study for discourses of environmental education in the early years and local practices of taking children into nature are also discussed.     

The mis/uses of ‘voice’ in (post)qualitative research with children and young people: Histories,politics and ethics

Abstract

This article extends recent attempts to think (post)qualitative research together with decolonial, postcolonial and other critiques – as a frictional, fraught encounter. I review how the concept of voice has been used in past and present research with children and young people: from research speaking about children and young people, dialogical speaking with the ‘agentic’ young person, poststructural refusals of ‘raw voices’ speaking for themselves, and (post)qualitative onto-epistemological experiments with utterances spoken in research assemblages. Reading one of my research practices – the mis/use of cloth puppets with high school students – through recent critiques of (post)qualitative work, two particular concerns materialize: accounting for relations between past and present research, and accounting for what comes to matter during and after research encounters.     

Researching the everyday: young people’s experiences and expressions of citizenship

This paper reports on a research study which drew attention to the constitutive nature of the everyday world in young people’s subjectivities and practices of citizenship. Central to the aim of this research was a need for alignment between the focus of the research (‘everyday’ citizenship), with methods which could illuminate the day-to-day experiences of being a citizen. In this paper, I re-examine some of the ‘everyday’ data generated by two research methods which were initially discounted as rambling or divergent. This data characteristically had frequent interjections, incomplete sentences, questions and queries, or a sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. Through a re-analysis of this data, I consider the potential it offers to contribute conceptual and theoretical insights into young people’s citizenship dispositions and practices. The research revealed the diverse, complex and contested understandings of citizenship that young people were forming in the context of day-to-day social and spatial interactions.     

‘Children of the street’: sexual citizenship and the unprotected lives of Ghanaian street youth

Youth-sensitive policies are gradually gaining recognition in Africa. The release of the recent publication Children in Ghana by the Ministry of Women and Children's Affairs (MOWAC) and UNICEF-Ghana attests to the value the country places on young people's perspectives. Guided by Richardson's conceptual framework on sexual citizenship, this paper draws on four sets of focus group discussions, informal conversations and interviews with 24 young people aged between 14 and 19 (seven young men and 17 young women), all of whom were living on the streets of a city in Ghana. It shows how young people navigate sexuality in a context of poverty and in an era of HIV/AIDS. It argues that the young women's demonstration of a sense of agency, evident in the midst of violence and insecurity, contradicts the notion of childhood sexual innocence. These experiences challenge the view that human rights and sex education are sufficient strategies to address young people's transitions to a safe adulthood within impoverished contexts.     

‘We are so over pharaohs and pyramids!’ Re‐presenting the othered lives with young people through an international studies program

Based on a year‐long implementation of an international studies program in a rural middle school using videoconferencing technology, this paper focuses the international presenters' interpretation of and reaction to the program through their interaction with the students. Attention here is paid to the ways that the presenters' assumptions and beliefs affect their (re)construction of their own cultures. Some contradiction in presenters' re‐presentations can be discussed further using a distinction between the social observer and the social participant, and a categorization of roles taken by the Third‐World individuals. The presenters provided following suggestions for improving the program implementation in rural learning environments: (1) teach students about the misrepresentation and cultural stereotypes in the US media; (2) provide analogies between the program presentations and the corresponding aspects of the US culture; and (3) teach them the constructs with which the various cultures are viewed and evaluated.