From February 21, 2010, I am starting an exciting discussion series at http://www.dabesaki.com/cgi-bin/blog to elicit discussion around youth and development paradigms. It will be interesting to explore how mainstream development discourses, approaches and theories conceptualise youth development and implications for youth policy and planning. In recent times, ’Youth’ has been conceptualised mainly from the view point of the rights based approach, with participation and access to services, especially reproductive health and educational services at the core.
Within the mainstream discourses, youth have mainly been discussed within the fields of psychology and biology with key concepts on puberty and adolescence at the centre. Although various concepts in age-long, contemporary development discourse include concepts explaining why young people behave in certain ways and laws have been put in place to provide special treatment to young law breakers (under 18), not much effort has been made to theorise youth development as has been done with feminist theories as a means to explain gender inequalities.
The few existing efforts that theorise youth development have mainly emanated from the United States- as early as 1904, Stanley Hall launched a scientific study of adolescence. His approach attempted to explain the psychological and physical changes that occur during adolescence and social aspects of these changes. However, his connotation of adolescence as a period of ‘storm and stress’ problematised youth as those ‘at risk’ and ‘problems to be fixed.’ But since the early 1990’s, efforts have started to shift from deficit based, problem-solving modules to positive youth development approaches working with young people as assets rather than liabilities. Given their powerful networks and peer influences, youth are a unique social capital, which can benefit society immensely.
The transition to PYD is a major leap forward. However, despite this progress, there still remains much to be done to evolve mainstream youth development theoretical frameworks, just like the case of the feminist movements, which would eventually lead to integrated strategies drawing from such fields as biology, medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology and economics to explain youth and their development. Thus, the key questions for discussion are:
· Are there existing modules or models of youth development that need to be taken into account, discussed, expanded and possibly further disseminated?
· Is the positive youth development model a good one? If so, is it being effectively utilised in programmes beyond the United States and beyond the sphere of youth participation to other aspects of young people’s lives?
· What synergies are possible from existing policy mechanisms and theoretical frameworks to inform better youth development programming?
· Are there existing theories within the social and applied sciences that can explain youth behaviours, development challenges and provide insights on how to solve them?
Kindly post your comments below and you are very welcome to post links to any useful websites, papers and journal articles. Any queries can be emailed directly to mail@dabesaki.com. I am looking very much forward to a lively debate in the coming days.
Ps: the discussion on this initial thread will be open until February 27, 2010.
Posted at: 04:29 PM | Add Comment
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