Imagining an Education System Responsive to Young People's Needs: Past, Present and Future Positioning of Youth and Young People

Abstract

To fully ascertain the affordances of arts-based methodologies in empowering young people at the edge of education and society, this chapter critically examines their positioning within the formal schooling system, both globally and in the contexts of the local. By interrogating formal education system issues of significance for youth and young people that create border lines to their educational engagement and achievement, this chapter confronts shortcomings to re-image education systems that are responsive to young people’s lives and create different futures. This chapter applies Smyth’s (2016) spatial and temporal questions to the strategies and programmes outlined in Arts-based Practices with Young People at the Edge: ‘What is producing disengagement from school (i.e., past experiences)? … How dis(re-)engagement is being experienced by young people (i.e., present conditions) … and … what needs be done differently about dis(re-) engagement from school (i.e., a future that needs to be brought into existence)?’ (p. 133). The chapter begins by exploring how past experiences evidence that schools do not deal with the issues that young people present with and then examines present experiences, including how alternative sites serve the mainstream of school, thus positioning youth further at the edge. This compelling evidence informs the future positioning of young people requiring a ‘very different future that needs to be created’ (Smyth, 2016, Puncturing notions of precarity through critical educational research on young lives in Australia: Towards a critical ethnography of youth. Ethnography and Education, 11(2), p. 133). The authors consider how the reimagining of educational systems is founded on practices of imagining new and multiple ways of young people being in the world that value their lifeworlds and experiences. This approach draws on the notion to ‘Live well in a world worth living in’ (Kemmis et al., 2014, Changing practices, changing education. Springer, p. 27) (Yindyamarra Winhanganha, a Wiradjuri phrase meaning ‘the wisdom of knowing how to live well in a world worth living in’), thus suggesting this could be where we want to imagine. Such approaches support providing young people with ‘freedoms to choose a life that they have reason to value’ (Sen, 1999, Development as freedom. Random House, pp. 14–15) with ‘the goal of producing decent world citizens who can understand the global problems to which this and other theories of justice respond and who have the practical competence and the motivational incentives to do something about those problems’ (Nussbaum, 2009, Education for profit, education for freedom. Liberal Education, p. 3). The chapter concludes by proposing that arts-based methodologies offer insights of youth into responding to the questions: What is the very different future that needs to be created? That is, how the educational system can support young people in making changes in their own life and working with others to create ‘a very different future’. Secondly, what are these institutions that would enable young people to ‘speak back’ and ‘exercise the power to bring about change’?