Engagement,passivity and detachment: 16‐year‐old students’ conceptions of politics and the relationship between people and politics

While there is a wealth of literature on young people and politics, most studies have examined their interest, trust and participation in politics as well as their attitudes toward and knowledge about formal politics. Little is known, however, about young people and the concept of politics. This article investigates 16‐year‐old students’ perceptions of the concept of politics and their conceptions of the relationship between people and politics. This knowledge is valuable for citizenship and social studies education, as an increasingly polarised political climate poses challenges to democratic politics and, consequently, to young people's political engagement and participation. In this study, semi‐structured interviews were conducted with nine students at five Norwegian upper secondary schools. The students varied in their interest and involvement in politics. A main finding is that the students perceived politics as processes related to shaping society, as decisions and activities related to ruling a country, and as the activities of discussion and debate. Three conceptions of the relationship between people and politics are presented: engagement, passivity, and detachment. In addition, while the 16‐year‐olds participated in political discussions privately and at school, they stated that they did not participate in political discussions in social media. Implications for citizenship and social studies education include the need to strengthen the bottom‐up perspective on politics and focus on in‐depth understanding of political processes and tools and methods of social‐scientific enquiry, as well as providing students with opportunities for and practice with handling opposition in political discussions online.     

Self,Space and Place: Youth identities and citizenship

This paper is concerned with questions of identity, citizenship and social change as these are experienced by young people in the UK today. In the course of recent changes to the context and content of youth transitions the notion of citizenship has come to the fore as a means of discussing young people's move into independent membership of society. Debates about citizenship in the UK currently encompass a range of complex themes - competency, responsibility and active (community) participation which go beyond an understanding of citizenship as a simply technical or legal term. In this paper we adopt a broad conceptualization of citizenship in order to explore the identity work that young people engage in as they negotiate their way through to social majority. In particular, we consider how young people's need for space, and their emergent sense of place, are aspects of a citizenship identity which young people 'learn', work at and negotiate over in their leisure time.     

A Typology of Parental Involvement in Education Centring on Children and Young People: Negotiating familialisation,institutionalisation and individualisation

This article explores the widespread emphasis on parental involvement in education from the perspectives of children and young people. In contrast to the conceptualisation of children as variable social actors, policy initiatives to link home and school more effectively, and research-generated typologies of parental involvement, unthinkingly familialise and institutionalise children by ignoring any part they may play in parental involvement in their education. Drawing on data from our study of children's understandings of home-school relations, we develop and elaborate a typology that centres on the complex ways that children and young people talk about creating, acceding to, and resisting their parents' involvement in their education. The socially patterned differences between the children and young people's understandings and experiences demonstrate how the broad social processes of familialisation, institutionalisation and individualisation are, in fact, concretely lived and negotiated in variable ways. Nevertheless, there are also some commonalities in children and young people's resistance around notions of privacy.     

Older people’s participation in political organizations: The role of generativity and its impact on well-being

Aging population has increased a global concern to keep seniors active and healthy. Civic participation, in particular, has been highlighted for its social and community benefits and its impact on elders’ health and well-being. To date, however, most studies have explored volunteering; other types of civic activities, such as political participation, are largely overlooked. This study analyzes the relationship between older people’s active involvement in political organizations, generativity, and hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. We selected two samples of Spanish older people: a sample of elders actively involved in political organizations (n = 97) and a comparison group (n = 85). Measures of generative concern, hedonic well-being, and eudaimonic well-being were applied. Results showed that politically active elders obtained higher scores on generative concern than comparison group individuals. Furthermore, generative concern predicted higher scores on both eudaimonic and hedonic well-being. However, active involvement in political organizations was not related to higher levels of well-being in the multivariate analyses. Translating generative concerns into effective behaviors, for instance political activities, may imply sacrifices and efforts, such that higher levels of well-being do not necessarily result from these activities. Thus, results from this study call into question the positive effect of civic participation on elders’ well-being, showing that this may not be necessarily the case for those who are actively involved in political organizations. Future research may build on these results to compare the differential effect of different kinds of generative activities on older people’s well-being.     

Young People,Politics and News Media: Beyond political socialisation

This article considers the place of news media-particularly television news-in young people's political socialisation. Following a brief sketch of debates about young people's apparent indifference to politics and to news media, it provides a critical review of previous research in this field. It argues that researchers have often operated with a functionalist notion of socialisation and an unduly narrow conception of political understanding. The second part of the article provides a summary of some key themes raised by the author's own research into young people's interpretations of television news. It focuses particularly on the question of young people's apparent cynicism about politics, and on the characteristics of 'critical viewing'. The article concludes with a call for media education as a crucial dimension of political education and contemporary citizenship.     

Young people's involvement in service evaluation and decision making

This study examined young people's decision making on issues that affect their lives: bullying in different contexts (e.g., family, peer groups, school) and their involvement in evaluating the availability and effectiveness of support services (e.g., disability, care). Key aims of this study were to offer young people a platform to evaluate existing services and make recommendations towards their improvement, and to discuss ways of tackling bullying at school. Focus groups were formed with 54 young people who had experienced challenges due to bullying, learning difficulties/disabilities, and caring responsibilities for family members with disabling conditions, and discussions about services and decision making on issues that affect their lives were facilitated. The findings point to a sense of agency in young people's lives with regard to evaluating and negotiating services and offering suggestions for their improvement within their family and peers. However, in their view, their decisions regarding bullying exerted limited influence within the school context. These results raised interesting issues about young people's capacity to evaluate services and the contextual influences on their involvement in decision making.     

Up or down and out? A systemic analysis of young people's educational pathways in the youth justice system in England and Wales

Many young people in the youth justice system in England and Wales are educationally marginalised and systemic barriers to their engagement with education persist. This article presents an analytical framework for understanding how education and youth justice practices shape young people's educational pathways during their time in the youth justice system with the aim of understanding the systemic dynamics that encourage or impede young people's engagement with education. It draws on data from a case study of 32 young people who were serving either a community or a custodial sentence under the supervision of one youth offending team in England and Wales. Using as analytical starting points Bourdieu's and Wacquant's conceptualisations of competing dynamics within the ‘bureaucratic field’ of state governance and Hodkinson's careership theory, this article discusses the interplay between exclusionary and inclusionary interests operating within and between the agencies of education and youth justice and the extent to which they play a role in sustaining young people's involvement in education or compounding their educational and social marginalisation.     

Learning to (Dis)Engage? The Socialising Experiences of Young People Living in Areas of Socio-Economic Disadvantage

ABSTRACT

Young people are increasingly required to demonstrate civic engagement in their communities and help deliver the aspirations of localism and Big Society. Using an ecological systems approach this paper explores the experiences of different groups of young people living in areas of socio-economic disadvantage. Using volunteering as an example of civic engagement it is shown that barriers and motivators for young people stem from within the micro, meso, exo and macrosystems, and that these interact with each other, and with bio-psychological factors within individuals, to bring about differential opportunities and outcomes for young people. Through examining the experiences of three different groups of young people placed within socio-economically disadvantaged communities, considerable variation in levels of civic engagement are identified and it is suggested that some young people's lived experiences are resulting in decisions to civically disengage. It is argued that young people need to benefit from genuine opportunities to develop self-efficacy if they are to respond to the demands of Big Society aspirations for localised decision-making.     

Making ‘us’ visible: Using membership categorisation analysis to explore young people's accomplishment of collective identity-in-interaction in relation to digital technology

This article examines young people's sense of self and collective identity in relation to their use of specific digital tools available at their school. We use membership categorisation analysis (MCA) to explore how a group of young people produce a collective identity-in-interaction as captured in concrete relational speech acts. Fine-grained MCA analysis of group interview talk reveals participant students operating as a collectivity to accomplish a sense of shared identity in relation to the iPad. This focus on the ways in which young people's identities are intertwined with digital technology distinguishes this article from the technicist and operational perspectives that dominate the field of educational technology research and demonstrates MCA's potential for illuminating the relationship that young people have with technology. The article contributes to a growing body of research that engages with more nuanced ways of understanding contemporary, technology-mediated learning as a process of producing not only knowledge and skills, but also selfhood—both private and shared.     

A European Demos? The Nordic adult education tradition-- folkeoplysning --faces a challenge

The keyword in the Nordic tradition for adult education is 'people' (folk). But the term 'people' is used in three different ways: people as a political category, a cultural category and a social category. Therefore, the term 'people's enlightenment' ( folkeoplysning ) has been defined as different ways to create empowered citizens, to provide enlightenment on the people's culture, and to educate the underenlightened and marginalised. What kind of adult education is required in the current situation? Is a political, cultural or social interpretation of the term most needed? This question is discussed in light of the European integration process. ' Folkeoplysning ' is not, by definition, based on a specific interpretation of the concept 'people'. On the contrary, the concept constitutes a battlefield on which different interests attempt to leave their own imprint.     

Communities in the making: Pedagogic explorations using oral history

This article discusses two projects supported by the Higher Education Active Community Fund, which involved student and staff volunteers in working with local communities and community-based organisations in two London boroughs. Oral history methods were used to investigate and represent the experiences of elderly people living in Borough A and young people who have been in foster care in Borough B and their carers. Both projects involved collecting detailed life stories on video and editing these for exhibition in the public domain. The video for Borough A was to form part of the Council's website, the older people's portal. The video for Borough B was to be used to train people providing professional services to young people in foster care and to involve the young people in filming, editing and producing a soundtrack. The article discusses the aims and context of the two projects and critically reviews the learning experiences involved. It analyses issues raised by volunteering, working with local communities, and attempting to represent marginalised experience. It reflects critically on notions of community and community development and discusses relations between oral history projects and community definition, higher education and society.     

Compulsory citizenship for the disenfranchised: benchmarking students,schools, and social and political attitudes before the Citizenship Order

This article reviews the current state of the debate about the political orientation and social attitudes of young people. After cautioning against a pessimistic view of moral decline, the article reports the results from a survey of 1249 young people in Hertfordshire. While showing evidence of low levels of political knowledge, interest, trust and efficacy, the findings do not confirm a lack of engagement with the wider social world. They show that young people contribute to social capital, by volunteering, for example, and that young people have broadly developed moral awareness. We explore students' engagement in citizenship-type activities both within and outside school; the extent to which they have covered the citizenship National Curriculum in school; and the degree to which they are active participants in their school. Our findings are generally positive, identifying reasonably high levels of engagement and integration. In short, there is a base from which to develop curricular reforms to promote political education.     

Closing Sex Education's Knowledge/Practice Gap: The reconceptualisation of young people's sexual knowledge

In rethinking what is theoretically conceived as a 'gap' between what young people learn in sexuality education and what they do in practice, this article argues for the need to comprehend young people's sexual knowledge from their own conceptualisation of this. Drawing on empirical findings from research with New Zealanders aged 17-19, young people's own understandings of their sexual knowledge are explored. These findings indicate how young people in the study conceptualised sexual knowledge in two ways: as information derived from secondary sources such as sexuality education, and knowledge gleaned from personal sexual experience. Hierarchies were evident within and between such types of sexual knowledge, in terms of the status young people afforded, and the interest they displayed in them. The type of sexual knowledge young people were most interested in, and which they identified as lacking in sexuality education, centred on a 'discourse of erotics'. It is argued that the inclusion of this discourse within sexuality education programmes might offer one way of closing the knowledge/practice gap, by raising the status of sexuality education's messages for young people and drawing this information closer to their lived sexual experiences.     

Gendered youth transitions: Are patterns changing? A view from The Netherlands

Abstract

Changes in the social structuring of of the life‐phase ‘youth’ and high rates of youth unemployment during the eighties have opened discussion over posited shifts in young people's work orientations and a weakening of the gender‐specificity of youth transitions. Using data from The Netherlands, this paper argues that changes in educational participation, patterns of family life, and work orientations have certainly taken place, but that these cannot be straightforwardly interpreted in terms of individualisation processes and their consequences. Young people remain firmly attached to paid work as a central component of their identities and life plans, and this is increasingly so for young women. Nevertheless, youth transitions remain highly gendered in character, frames of meaning, and implications for the course of adult life.     

The social meanings of the C-Card scheme: the importance of friends and peers

This paper draws on findings from an analysis of interviews with young people aged 14–18 years, to explore the peer influences in young people's informal social networks which can affect their access to sexual health services. The research focuses on the social meanings of a C-Card condom distribution scheme in North East England. Such schemes are widespread in the UK as a way of providing access to condoms and sexual health advice for young people in health and community settings. Focusing on one aspect of a broader study, the paper outlines the important social, emotional and practical resources provided by young people's chosen friendship groups in the process of acquiring a C-Card, which offers a route to accessing sex and relationships advice and condoms. Informal peer networks inform attitudes and expectations which can influence gendered patterns of behaviour. Through a focus on the educational possibilities of the C-Card scheme, the study suggests a need to revisit the dynamics of young people's peer relationships and harness their potential to influence sexual attitudes and behaviour in positive ways, rather than simply seeing these always as a source of negative pressure.     

Imagined Adulthood: Resources,plans and contradictions

In this paper we illustrate the contradictory consequences of female individualization by exploring young people's imagined futures, drawing on an analysis of 'lifelines' collected as part of an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study of young people's transitions to adulthood. We discuss the method and compare lifelines across the sample. We suggest that while there are areas of consensus (such as the hetero-normative goal of marriage and children by 35) the traditionally gendered transitions to adulthood are under pressure, a pressure that is exerted most strongly by working class young people. Through three contrasting case studies we illustrate how the ways in which young people imagine their futures are constrained by the resources and possibilities of their particular social locations.     

Local Variations in School‐Leaver Unemployment within a Large City

Abstract

The social problems associated with youth unemployment are compounded by its concentration in particular areas. This paper examines how and why school‐leaver unemployment rates vary across different areas of Glasgow. The level of participation in full‐time education significantly influences the local level of youth unemployment: in areas where fewer young people continue in full‐time education, more of them enter the labour market and thus put themselves ‘at risk’ of unemployment. Among labour‐market entrants, unemployment rates vary across areas, but only in relation to young people's educational and family characteristics. Area inequalities within a city are derivative of individual line qualities; the chances of(un) employment of other wise com‐parable young people are much the same whichever part of the city they live in. The paper concludes by reviewing the policy implications of these findings, and the possible role of education and training measures.     

Reviews

Introduction: Despite government support of culturally appropriate sex and relationships education (SRE), young people's access to information is limited and sexual health needs are not being met, particularly among youth from black and minority ethnic groups. Joint‐working between health, education, voluntary sectors and parents has been heralded as key in redressing inequalities in sexual health outcomes and access to information. Our study focuses on SRE provision for young Muslim Bangladeshis, highlighting the complexities involved in streamlining SRE messages.

Objective: To explore stakeholder views about SRE and ways to improve SRE delivery.

Design: Sixteen semi‐structured interviews were conducted in 2005 with stakeholders from schools, National Health Service, and parent and voluntary sector bodies in a London borough.

Results: Two key factors enhancing Bangladeshi youth's risk of infection and unwanted pregnancy were identified: inadequate parental understanding about sexual health and limited parent‐delivered SRE; and patchy provision of culturally appropriate, school‐based SRE. Factors affecting SRE provision included culturally rooted perceptions of sex/sexuality and limited participation of stakeholders, (religious leaders, parents), in developing and delivering SRE.

Conclusions: This study highlights the importance of widespread community engagement, underlining that joint‐working, and the development and delivery of culturally appropriate and consistent SRE, necessitates communication and collaboration among stakeholders in young people's health and well‐being.     

Environmental Encounters

Abstract

This essay provides a selective review of interdisciplinary research of the bases for and obstacles to effective environmental advocacy. Analyses of the social backdrop of contemporary environmental advocacy are synthesized and research associated with environmental communication is considered in the context of how people process information and appeals associated with the environment. Theory and research involving social cognition is used to indicate ways in which advocates might better promote environmentalism. The analysis concludes with a call for research examining how the perceptions of the self and the environment influence people's understanding of environmental advocacy.     

Participatory agricultural research and decentralisation in Vietnam

Abstract

Based on a conceptual framework, that describes the relationship between the effectiveness of up-scaling participation and implementing decentralisation, the objective of this paper is to analyse the effectiveness of decentralisation measures in the Agricultural Technology System (ATS) of Vietnam. It discusses whether the decentralisation efforts so far have enabled the rural population to express their options and take joint decisions in the sense of participation. The paper uses primary and secondary data, collected between November 2000 and June 2001. The paper first discusses the theoretical literature on up-scaling participation and decentralisation. Emphasis is given to highlight the links between the concepts of good governance in decentralisation and its effects on people's participation in the decision making process. Thereafter, the Vietnamese decentralisation measures are reviewed and it is assessed to which extent the agricultural sector and its relevant state agencies have benefited from these efforts. The experiences from the decentralisation activities is summarised. Whether decentralisation opened space for the rural people to express their opinions and to ensure that their preferences are incorporated in the ATS is specially considered. The paper closes with recommendations.