In a supervision session this week and holding a relevance to International Women’s Day, a discussion regarding how to encourage balance with a team of youth workers in relation to a much more balanced response to gendered needs. I enjoy the fluidity of offering supervision and the many avenues discussions can lead to that work to support leadership and development of practice.
#internationalwomensday #needsassessment #youngwomen #youthwork #ywcr #gender #supervision #teamdevelopment #IWD24
Situationally, the team find themselves focusing on the distraction and re-alignment of young men in the social environment of the youth centre and therefore activities are focused predominately on an imbalance of needs. Arguably, young women as a fringe outcome of the valuable work undertaken have become secondary to the moral and social panics that exist in the behaviours identified. The supervision discussion with the manager/leader considered the importance of acknowledging that we are working with multiple ideologies, principles and indeed pedagogies within youth work teams and opportunities to explore these ideas are important to continue to develop approaches. Each person has their own personal ideas that contribute to the team form and culture that is expressed in the youth work environment in both verbal and non-verbal actions and expressed views. This subtle influence in practice is an action for leaders to develop team approaches and evaluate to sustain effective and establish the direct vs indirect engagement strategies.
We discussed how adaptation of team understanding and criticality of the values and methods employed to create the youth work environment with support and act as a potential limitation to enable equitable youth work. At this point, the contribution of Mary Wollstonecraft and the guiding principle of ‘educational and social equality for women’ which requires radical reform; change to educational systems and in our context, a clear commitment to a rights-based approach that does not limit the important value that young women bring to their social context. It is significant that whilst working with the vanities of men and young men, as they emulate and determine how the world looks, their access to inadequate power to validate broader ideas that support a much more responsive and political dimension to understanding our work and therefore team development and response to young women.
The validity of ensuring an equitable and reasoned needs assessment in order to determine informal education curricula was an aspect of the discussion and the use of needs assessment in enabling team focus and ethos was explored. This link below will take you to a short practical resource guide may be useful to encourage change in examining needs with young people on a personal, community and political level; let me know what you think and how this works for you in practice once you have read via the following link.
The discussion developed to an important feature of youth work and the styles of delivery and how the transition from earlier character building pedagogies have to an extent resurfaced in the terrain of targeted responses to young people’s needs. Is this something that has become a common norm in youth work? Please comment on this blog to add to the debate/discussion.
Not without reframing the social pedagogy can we establish equitable voice and agency and working with challenge and discourse to encourage renewed compassion in the youth work environment alongside the communities we work within. This displacement of working with perpetual negatives and identifying assets and strengths through critical dialogues can work effectively to address the ‘safe environment’ we profess to develop with young people.
Encouraging a team review of the ‘purpose, power and potential’ of youth work and informal education positionality to emphasise the compassion and understanding of young people in their worlds. This in order to adjust the 'pace and rate' of response to needs as explored by young people and responding to the steps that manifest in inequality to sustain change and focus less on the emergency needs by observing and listening to the impact underneath the crisis from young womens perspectives. Are there improved choices, decisions and responses that ongoing commitment to redressing power in youth work that can import Wollstonecrafts ideas in contemporary youth work to reduce inequality?
Comment on this blog post to continue this important focus within our work.
“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks” Mary Wollstonecraft.
#internationalwomensday #needsassessment #youngwomen #youthwork #ywcr #gender #supervision #teamdevelopment
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