13 October 2006
I went to The Park where I met with Phil Cotgreaves from Youth Moves. Phil told me that most projects have some sort of digital technology in them. He said that if you go to most youth centres they have equipment like digital cameras which young people regularly use with staff.
Phil said that people need to know how they can access and use such spaces and how and where they can respond to current issues and debates. He said that he thinks there is a need for more PR about such spaces.
Phil suggested a need to consider the way in which young people interact with each other through radio and other digital technology. Phil told me that he has looked into setting up a digital radio station that could be run for and by young people. He said he thought this was a great use of digital technology and a great way of getting instant feedback from young people on anything.
Phil then talked about text messaging and how it was a really useful tool for instant feedback. He suggested that there might be ways of using this technology more effectively by text messaging a question to thousands of young people’s phones. He said that this would be a huge task but that this shouldn’t mean we don’t do it. He said that digital technology could be used to extend opportunities to communicate with each other, through websites and texts etc.. However, he added that text messages don’t compensate for conversation and to this end face-to-face meetings through screen based technology might be the best way to go in the long term. He said that he thought text messages were of a limited nature in that there is only so much you can ask in a text message and it is hard to build upon that question in any dialogic way. He said that for dialogue to take place there is a need for space such as the internet or face to face meetings, or to find another way. He suggested that the technology is there that can meet this challenge but that ways of using it to such ends need to be identified. He added that the best way of finding out what people think, or doing anything that could be considered similar to ‘market research’, is through people talking to one another.
He talked about the type of approach that is crucial to setting up any new uses of digital media with young people. He said that it is important that young people are actually involved in setting up projects and that they are involved in making policy decisions. Young people’s role in the decision making process is crucial and if young people aren’t involved then decisions shouldn’t be made. If decisions are made without young people’s involvement he said that any project wouldn’t work for long because young people need to have meaningful involvement and a sense of ownership, if a project and their relationship to it is to be sustained.
Phil told me that if a project is good then word gets around, so if young people think it is good then other young people will join in.
Phil said that for an idea like the radio station to happen there needs to be an infrastructure in place that is based on an equal partnership. Such an approach would mean that young people and staff would be trained alongside each other and that there would need to be a policy about young people being involved in everything. Phil added that staff would have to be clear about the pivotal role of young people and what the expectations were and why they were working in this way. He said that the individuals involved, and their approaches, would be crucial.
Phil then talked about how it is easy to train people to carry out a straightforward task, like taking a photo and emailing it, but that what is important is to support people to identify how such a process might be useful to them. One of the ways is which such training can be useful to young people is through some form of accreditation. Phil added that there needs to be an infrastructure that ensures that the ‘why’ as well the ‘how’ of using digital technology is covered in any training. Phil then said that he thought that Knowle West Media Centre has a solid infrastructure that works successfully with young people and so there is no need to reinvent that. He said that on this basis he thought one of the things that needs to be addressed is capacity development at Knowle West Media Centre.
Phil then returned to the issue of accreditation. He said that there has to be an element of work with young people that is about accreditation because if you have a fifteen year old with few or no qualifications who has engaged well in a project then their involvement needs to be proved or evidenced; there needs to be some sort of certificate to prove what they have done.
Phil explained his rationale for prioritising some sort of accreditation by highlighting how young people without any sort of formal accreditation don’t always recognise their own skills. For example, when writing a cv for a potential employer or further education young people often don’t include things they can do unless they have a certificate to prove that they can do it.
Phil added that it was also important to highlight in any certificate that was about young people’s informal learning, that they have done something because they wanted to do it, and not because they were told to do it. He said that this would also confirm their self-motivation.
Phil said that the key to setting up the radio project or any other project using new media was not to do with technical expertise but interpersonal skills. He said that the most important thing would be to find the right staff with a passion for the work and with a clear sense of the best ways in which to engage young people. Phil suggested that in some scenarios the best deliverers were young people themselves.
Phil added that he thought it was important for young people to know their options and to be enabled to make choices of their own. He talked about this as being an important aspect of engaging with unmotivated young people.
Phil said that whatever work takes place there needs to be an opportunity built in for existing staff and young people to get the relevant training, both in digital technology and in delivery. He said that if both theory and practice were covered in such training it would be more feasible for young people involved to become the people delivering the project.
Phil talked about the wider team of staff at Youth Moves and how their jobs are often about going out and engaging young people in the participation process. This participation might just be about attending a youth club or it might be about joining the youth parliament. It is important that there are options and that young people choose to participate in ways that are relevant to them. It is also important that through the process of participation young people can be supported to develop greater aspirations based on their own interests and priorities. He said that potential is a great thing but that somehow it has to be drawn upon.
Phil returned to the idea of a radio station and talked about how such a project could work in the ways outlined above. He added that the radio station would be one of those projects that stimulated further engagement once it was established; for example more young people could be engaged through phone in shows or text messaging to the radio station, to voice their opinions.
Phil said that Youth Moves would be interested in being part of the process of establishing any such a project like the radio station and would be keen to get young people and youth workers involved.
Phil then talked about the way in which such an approach to working with young people is transposable onto work with older people. He said that such work is still about potential and working with people to support them to realise their potential. He said that there needs to be work done to identify who it is that goes and engages with older and younger people and how they might cross over more effectively.
Phil said that it would be great, for example, if young people could work with older people to familiarise them with digital technology. For example, there could be courses where young people show older people how to use all the functions on their mobile phones. He said that what stops this happening is that there is a need for different agencies to join up and make connections between their work, across generations. Phil highlighted how such cross-generational working had many positive outcomes. He talked about how the life experiences of older people can have impact on younger people. He said that young people rarely have contact with older people apart from within their families and that it is important that young people have some wider sense of older people’s life experiences. He suggested that digital technology might stimulate a platform for such exchange to take place. We talked about the national trust’s diary day that is happening next week and how this was one such use of new media whereby different people could share their life experiences.
Phil also said that he thought it was important that projects such as the radio station had the capacity to support group learning and individual learning. He said that it would be a group process that individuals could be involved in and that this was important because some people work better in a group and others work better alone.
