Voices blog

Last night Leila and I headed out to Google UK’s HQ for the launch of the Young Foundation’s report about using digital technology to help engage young people in social action called ‘Plugged in, untapped‘.

Apart from my excitement of being inside the Google office (note to self and others, this is the COOLEST office in the world, they have a mobile ice cream van!) I was really interested in exploring whether digital technology could offer a more cost effective model of engagement in developing young people’s capacity and inclination to participate in society.
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Yesterday a team of Citizenship Foundation staff headed off to a West end premiere of Value Life, a movie by a group of students from Gladesmore Community School to tackle the issue of gun and knife crime in London.

It was amazing to arrive at the Prince Charles cinema to be greeted by a red carpet and lots of students from the school, apart the lack paparazzi it was like every film premiere I had ever seen on TV!!

Students were clearly proud of the achievements of the small cast who had worked with a professional director and two professional actors including Lindsey Coulson (who plays Carol Jackson in Eastenders).

As we settled down in the most comfy seats in the world to watch the film, I was filled with pride and nervous energy in equal measure. Pride because the Value Life project started as a result of Youth Act training with 9 students and two teachers five years ago and here we were in the West End with professional actors and an audience of about 250 people; nervous energy because I hadn’t seen the film and I wasn’t sure what it would be like.

The film is a 20 minute short about the reality of the lives of many young people who get sucked into the gun and knife crime culture - young people who are basically good but find themselves making major adult decisions over their ego, their family, their friends with easy access to weapons.

It was really important to see how easy it was to fall into using a knife or a gun: a pushy boyfriend can talk you into holding a gun for him; anger about a stabbing can result in you wanting revenge - it was all so easy, it was all so tragic, it was all so preventable!

The students are showing the film in Wood Green on the 20th of July - if you can, book a ticket to see it!

I have first hand experience of the value businesses and their employees can bring to the classroom having been a volunteer myself and also spending my recent career managing employee volunteering programmes.  Increased motivation, confidence, self-esteem, employability skills and communication ability are just a few of the benefits to young people (and adults!) that spring to mind when I think about partnerships between businesses and schools.

I now manage the Giving Nation Challenge at the Citizenship Foundation which, along with other schemes such as Lawyers in Schools, aims to provide support to young people by providing adult volunteers to share their expertise whilst acting as role models and coaches in a classroom setting.

I am therefore very impressed to hear about a new campaign launched by charity Education and Employers Taskforce which is dedicated to help build awareness amongst organisations of all sizes in the public and private sectors about how they can support their local school and help shape the motivation, skills and employability of young people.

The ‘Visit our Schools’ week is taking place between 18-22 October 2010. It provides business leaders with the opportunity to visit their local school, meet the Headteachers, staff and students to inspire them to get involved and make a big difference to their communities.

Schools and colleges are encouraged to register to take part. Business leaders can also sign up to visit their local school.

I hope that this week helps to develop many fruitful relationships between businesses and schools and I look forward to updating you on the outcomes later in the year.

I was struck by the clear distinction between these two terms in the article by Zygmunt Bauman in the new Demos / V publication ‘An Anatomy of Youth’.

In his article ‘Belonging in the age of networks’ he differentiates the essence of these two terms. In short, he suggests that a community is more normally a group that you have membership of regardless of personal choice, and that you can’t easily drop out of… e.g. the locality that you grew up in, or your extended family etc. Such communities are often crucial in your identity-formation - often because you didn’t get the chance to avoid them: you were formed in the crucible of their personal and cultural forces whether you liked it or not. By contrast ‘networks’ are nearly always opted into for personal benefit of some sort. Their subject or identity appeals to you, and your choice to affiliate will more likely relate to your ‘chosen’ identity than the one that you developed like it or not.

So ‘social networks’ and ‘communities’ are not then synonymous. The former can be lightly entered into, tested, adopted to various degrees as suits you, and opted out of again. The choices remain your own, and by inference, their ability to ‘form’ you is slight as you can resist their force and take your avatar and mouse elsewhere if you don’t like the way it’s going.

By contrast ‘communities’ can’t be avoided. You have to stay with them, learn to negotiate and manage your way through them. Communities have politics where networks have cultures. I use those phrases carefully. Of course, communities have cultures as well as politics, but the words I want to stress here are ‘negotiate’ and ‘manage’. These two words are at the heart of politics. Politics is the activity of negotiating and managing the social order into the preferred version of members of an organised community (my definition). We need politics precisely because we can’t opt out. But we can opt out of networks.

What’s critical here is that we recognise the role of social networks in politics. They are not communities of the same order and they are not the place to learn politics through simply being a member. By contrast, school is. You can’t avoid school, and it is indeed a crucible of personal and social formation, not just a place of education.

Social networks can be a place for amplifying preferred choices into a consolidated force for action in the way that members choose. In this way they can be a great force for political intervention. But we shouldn’t revere then as an equivalent of ‘real’ communities. Young people in social networks are not learning politics by virtue of being members. Perhaps it’s time to be uncool and mention that…

Yesterday Tony Breslin and I were called to give evidence to the Speaker’s Conference. We were asked specifically about young people’s engagement in politics and what role if any, that citizenship education could play in getting young people interested in politics and choosing politics as a future career. (more…)