“Nobodies gonna know, nobodies gonna know”.
“They’re gonna know”.
“How would they know?”
(by Heliqs on TikTok)

This has been (and still is) a popular sound track used in TikTok’s and Instagram Reels and it was what was running around in my head as I thought about this topic of nobody knowing what is learnt in youth work. 

Firstly let’s say that this statement is not completely true, of course people know what is happening in youth work, more in some places than others but it is fair to say that generally people don’t know or don’t understand.

SITTING IN A BAR

I was being asked in my local bar the other day about what it is that I do and I proceeded to talk about youth work. The person listening looked at me incredulously and said, “so you control young people and tell them what to do!” 

SECRET LANGUAGE

My heart sank, and I quickly tried to explain this was not what I had said and that “it is about the empowerment of young people, it is a tool for personal development, social integration and the active citizenship of young people, it is about providing services for young people, it is a form of informal and non-formal education which has an ambivalent position between private aspirations and public expectations, it is above all an educational and developmental process based on young people’s active and voluntary participation and commitment, it is a tool to enable young people to develop holistically, working with them to facilitate their personal, social and educational development, it is activities that intentionally seek to impact young people, and it is about building good links with different services and to support children and young people’s transitions”.

Actually I did not say any of this, well maybe I did in my own way but one thing I know was that my answer was not making much sense to the person sitting in the bar. Just look at the words used in this previous paragraph, it’s all a bit scary. If you are not involved in youth work or any kind of social care work, probably it will not make much or any sense to you, especially if you are hearing it and not reading it. 

So where did I pull this language from? I simply did a Google search on “what is youth work about” and these are the first line of each return on the first page. This is how we describe ourselves, a secret language that only we understand (or pretend we do!). 

MAKING THE LANGUAGE FIT

Several years ago I met Georges Metz, Director of the National Youth Service in Luxembourg at a meeting of the Council of Europe, Quality Label Youth Centres. I remember how he described one youth centre that kept experiencing problems in the promotion of their events and activities. Eventually they realised that what they were doing was creating one promotional text about their work in youth work language – a language that maybe the young people understood but their parents did not, nor did the teachers in the schools or the political representatives or the media people they communicated with. They were creating one text for numerous different target groups, each target group having its own understanding of youth work – if any at all! They realised they needed to target their promotional information. As a result they worked on numerous formats and types of text for each promotion they needed to work on. 

They would create a youth friendly text and style that would reach young people, using comic strips or other attractive graphic designs. They would create posters for parents that they could put up at schools, waiting rooms, in the entrance of the youth centre and even around town – an attractive image, minimal information but descriptive in a way that would appeal to the parents. If they were writing to the media they would use press releases and write about their work in a more generic way. If they needed to be speaking to the political level they would create letters that used a language people at the political level would understand. 

To achieve all this it takes a lot of time and energy, it also requires time to sit and think about the language a particular target audience will understand, for young people or parents it can be more informal while it should be quite formal for politicians. What one target audience, teachers for example, will understand in one school is not necessarily the same in another school in another country. Will all psychologists or pedagogues understand “social integration and active citizenship” in the same way, and how differently will such a phrase be understood by a parent or a politician or someone sitting in a bar? 

LEARNING IN YOUTH WORK

One of the problems, well in my case, is that I am so stuck in the youth work language I know and use, that I struggle to change it! The words I use are descriptive, perfect and make total sense – to me. We use certain words and phrases because they specifically explain what youth work does, but are there other ways we could do this?

Perhaps one of the ways forward could be to talk about what young people learn in youth work as a means to creating an understanding of what youth work is. We don’t need to use the term soft skills – another code word – we can directly talk about young people growing in leadership, becoming better at communication, able to work better in teams, taking on responsibilities, being more decisive, gaining in confidence, better at managing themselves, better at solving problems, more likely to try to resolve a conflict rather than escalate it… There are many many more but as a starting point it seems this is language that people outside of youth work would also understand. 

BEING DESCRIPTIVE

Many times the listener is probably going to ask something like: “but how do you do this?”. This question opens up the possibilities to talk about what happens in the youth work setting; the activities, particular moments or incidents where learning occurs, a situation of sitting and listening to a young person, examples of young people taking responsibility to organise something – from cleaning the space to running a large scale event, sitting with a young person to support them to solve a problem, challenging a young person about their behaviour, having a discussion with a group of young people about a “hot” topic… 

This stage is where it can get tricky because it is easy to fall back into our youth work language again. I had to rewrite parts of the above paragraph several times because of the language – it’s just automatic. For example I wrote “Facilitating a discussion…”, OK maybe not the most secret of code words but still, in the moment it may sound strange to someone not from this field. 

This approach does not solve the problem, yout work will remain an anomaly to many people but it is one approach that can support some people at least to a better understanding. Youth work needs more recognition and needs more promotion – that would help in people knowing and understanding but that recognition needs to start with us coming up with better ways to explain about what we do. 

AND YOU?

So what do you do? It would be interesting to hear from any of you reading this, how do you explain what it is you do in a way that supports people to understand youth work? Please write in the comments, we would be very interested to hear from you.