Yael Ohana

“Educators need to become provocateurs”

Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?

Once upon a time, I was a youth activist in the Council of Europe’s All Different – All Equal campaign. For the time and the context, the political will expressed in this Campaign was unusual, maybe even radical. Key messages of the Campaign reveal how it understood the issues it sought to address. “Nothing about us without us”, for example, revealed the extent to which there was already awareness of the fact that the European youth field, its representative bodies and educational structures, did not yet include young people and youth organisations directly affected by Campaign issues – anti-Black racism, antigypsyism, or homophobia. What’s more, it proposed an approach of solidarity across all manner of interests and identities that rarely met and co-operated in the political context, despite many common challenges – religious, sexual, national, ethnic, language and transnational minority groups, diasporas, Black people and People of Colour, and Roma, refugees, asylum seekers, displaced people and young people with disabilities.

The Campaign valued the potential of non-formal education with young people, and not without reason. The nascent youth research agenda of the Youth Directorate of the mid-1990s was already able to show that typical youth work activities could be effective in developing the civic acumen and the sense of political effectiveness of young people, leading to the consolidation of something we would today refer to as a democratic culture (Vanandruel et al, 1996⁹). Layering these with educational activities addressing attitudes, values, and competences for living in the multicultural Europe was already recognised as a means of socialising young people into respect for cultural diversity and tolerance, attitudes they should then multiply to their peers and wider communities.

Nevertheless, implementing the Campaign quickly demonstrated the extent to which the very essence of what such a Campaign should be fighting for was no matter of consensus, not among the governments, but also neither among educators or the youth civil society organisations who were supposed to implement it. This was not only a matter of the perennial arguments between governmental and non-governmental representatives. This was a much more fundamental question – one of justice and injustice, one of the nature of social and political relations among people inside and between countries, one of the role of education in questioning the structural deficits of contemporary social and political arrangements.
 

Intercultural learning in the youth field

Traditionally for the European youth field, “intercultural education was seen as a means for facilitating encounters between young people from different ideological blocks and countries that never had the chance to meet, in an effort to overcome individual fears and prejudices as a means of contributing to peace and reconciliation (in the post-Second World War and in the Cold War reality)”- (Ohana & Otten: 2012³) While the Cold War reality described what had already been eclipsed by the time of the Campaign, the idea that the primary function of intercultural learning was to address individual fears of difference and prejudices about people who are different because they come from other countries or cultures had become pervasive. Culture, defined in rather static terms as something you can learn about, as an artefact, that “belongs” to some people but not others, was the primary unit of analysis for social relations as discussed in intercultural learning at the time.

This appeared counter-intuitive to many educators socialised in the youth programmes of the Council of Europe. Gavan Titley characterised the dilemma as follows: "While practices of tolerance and awareness are crucially important, they can be presented as the endgame of intercultural learning, as if a critical mass of the educated and aware will create a world where, as some cynics might put it, ‘we can just learn to get along". This form of cultural analysis both assumes that cultural identities are inherently problematic, essentially different and probably conflictual, yet it reduces the many dimensions of conflict to questions of cultural compatibility and understanding … A recurring manifestation of this is the common construction of racism as an individual pathology and aberration, necessitating re-education”. (Titley 2005)⁸
 

Pedagogy in the Education Pack

A close reading of the Education Pack is also instructive, as it provides an indication of the state of thinking regarding intercultural learning at that time and in the context of the Campaign. It is explicit about two key points regarding what intercultural learning is for: “Enabling people to discover and analyze the social, economic, cultural or educational reasons that lie behind situations of discrimination, refusal, exclusion and marginalization, and developing awareness about the possibilities for individuals and groups to act in order to bring about or to pursue social change based on values of solidarity, respect, acceptance of ‘difference’ and free exchange of ideas”. (Council of Europe 1995)

Although the Campaign included a great many activities celebrating differences and cultures, and challenging personal stereotypes and prejudices, its educational approach nevertheless combined aspects of best practice from critical pedagogy, with the more common practice of working to change personal / individual attitudes. In so doing, and by educating a whole generation of young people and youth organisations, including those representing minority communities who would otherwise not have had access to that kind of political context or training, the Campaign contributed to a more politically literate youth field. The Campaign is rightly credited with many lasting achievements for the positive re-positioning of minority young people within the institution, but also in youth policy at the European and member state levels, notably standards for youth participation and inclusion that actively considered them, the mainstreaming of human rights education as a core approach in European youth work practice, and recognition for access to social rights as a youth policy issue.
 

Culture over politics?

Fast forwarding to 2021, it is hard not to notice that the European political and social context that the Campaign sought to address remains largely intact. There has been precious little progress on many of the challenges that were important to the Campaign, and on several there has even been significant regression. It is also hard not to notice that the “cultural” approach to intercultural learning has not been eclipsed, despite the gravity of the situations that European youth work is asked to respond to. If anything, the dominance and increasing dependency of European youth work on European Union funding, the (conservative) priorities of member states, as well as a certain degree of complacency in the community of practice, has led to what can only be termed a “creeping de-politicisation”. Thinking and talking about European youth work as having a political mission makes practitioners and political stakeholders uncomfortable. (Ohana 2020)⁴

In comparison to the time of the Campaign, there is hardly any European training addressing the “political” or even intercultural learning. Training in critical emancipatory pedagogy, the staple of the post-1968 educational revolution, is no longer widely available from the European youth work support mechanisms, and is an obvious gap in the education of youth workers across Europe. The regularity with which youth work is accused of, and punished for, overstepping its mandate because the “neutrality” injunction on education has supposedly been disrespected, can only be considered alarming.

European youth work finds itself at an impasse, facing existential dilemmas for its purpose and pedagogy (Ohana 2020)⁴. Later campaigns chose to walk the less critical path – referring to their purpose in the terms of being “for” diversity, tolerance, respect, love. It is possible this was politically strategic. Yet we cannot help but ask about the place of fundamental issues of power, agency, polarisation, social, economic and cultural domination that determine social relations in, between and across European societies, and between Europe and the rest of the world, in the conceptualisation of such initiatives.

Rethinking intercultural learning

Twenty-five years after the Campaign, the time has come to revamp the terms of the youth work discourse. No, not all boats rise with the rising tide. Opportunity has rarely ever been enough to redress the injustices that racialised young people’s experiences. The free exchange of ideas and debate does not always deliver the most meritorious solutions for social and political problems. The struggles of young people from minorities are very rarely singular, more usually intersectional. Intercultural education is not primarily about learning about cultures or even learning between cultures. Static notions of European culture and “values” ever present in the youth work pedagogical canon belie racial illiteracy and pervasive ableism, possibly even a legacy of white supremacist thinking, even as they profess to educate for human rights and universal justice. Politically literate youth work is not primarily about young people learning about how to do policy or engage with politicians.

From this particular vantage point, a deep re-consideration of the kind of intercultural learning European youth work wants and needs for achieving the civic and political mission that the Campaign strove to fulfil is long overdue. The re-politicisation of intercultural learning is essential to any such enterprise. In the years since the Campaign, a lot of work has been done on the nature of political intercultural learning in the context of European youth work and provides excellent starting points for that (Titley 2005⁸, Ohana & Otten 2012³). Whole generations of practitioner-researchers have put forward the idea that intercultural learning has more to do with enabling socio-political critique, action to reveal and redress injustice and co-operative learning to enable solidarity across differences in position, power, ideology, personal or community beliefs than it has to do with cultural exchange and the development of personal attitudes.

Sergio Xavier has recently written about “unlearning and disengaging” from the installed narratives of a liberal democratic youth work that prepares young people, not for active and critical citizenship, but for obedient service to market and the state (Xavier 2020)¹⁰. This requires that the long-assumed meanings and values ascribed to ideas pervasive in the European youth work field must be questioned: What do key concepts, including participation, democracy, and even human rights, mean in the social realities youth work is expected to address today? (ibid.)

Consequently, the intercultural learning that takes place in the context of European youth work should be a space in which young people are encouraged and supported to identify and break down the ideological and political underpinnings of unjust power relations, and the ways they are perpetuated in society and by the state. Cunha and Gomes say that a key function of intercultural learning is to question the power relations inside the educational process of youth work itself: Who is in dialogue with who? Who is not? Why? Who defines something as a subject of intercultural learning, and on what grounds? (2005). In other words, a space of radical solidarity (Grant 2019).

Easier said than done? Maybe. Or maybe not.
 

New research directions

There is a wealth of research and practice that establish youth work and intercultural learning as critical pedagogy. Roholt and Baizerman propose a comparison of the “classical youth work” approach which they suggest is the most common practice of youth work in the United States, even worldwide, and the “civic youth work” approach, which they propose as a more alternative for the empowerment of young people.

It outlines a conceptualisation of youth work as a space of civic and political awareness, and of autonomous youth action on issues of concern to themselves and the societies they live in, as follows:
 

Some 40 academics working in the educational sciences in Germany proposed the Frankfurt Declaration of June 2015, in which the Beutelsbacher Consensus of 1976 (the magnum opus of German politische Bildung) is reworked and a set of essential criteria for critical emancipatory pedagogy are reiterated, as follows:
 

Such ideas about the necessity of a political approach in youth work pedagogy are nothing new.

In 2020, Hendrik Otten’s “Ten Theses” on intercultural learning in European youth work turned 30. The “Ten Theses” and their later revisions, remain the reference framework for intercultural learning as a process of political education, grounded in a critical analysis of the social and political conditions of participating young people, for tolerance of ambiguity, distance from social roles, empathy and solidarity are what we need to learn and how we learn (Otten 1990).

In 2012, Otten outlined three further reflections on what it will take to reclaim the political power of intercultural learning:

• the obligation to be intolerant, in other words, active intervention if human rights and justice are violated
• going beyond personhood, implying the transition from being an ethical, but nevertheless passive and self-interested individual, to being an interested and informed stakeholder and actor in society that expresses solidarity in everyday life with others
• democratizing democracy, in other words the ongoing process of “imagining the impossible” and the co-creation of alternative narratives about European politics and society among young people in all their plurality (Ohana & Otten 2012)³.

In so doing, European youth work might be able to move beyond the simplification and reductionism to which it is so prone. The key to a more authentic and politically-literate practice of intercultural learning in European youth work is not shouting about how we value our values, but in young people and educators having the chance to question the ways in which we and the rest of society go about living up to them.
 

References

¹ Cunha C. and Gomes R. (2008), ‘Against the waste of experiences in intercultural learning’, Coyote 13.

² Giroux, H. (2009) Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability? New York: Palgrave Macmillan

³ Ohana Y. and Otten H. (2012), Where do you stand? Intercultural Learning and Political Education in Contemporary Europe.

⁴ Ohana Y. (2020), ‘What’s politics got to do with it? European Youth Work Programmes and the Development of Critical Youth Citizenship’, JUGEND für Europa.

⁵ Otten H. (2009), ‘The Role of Intercultural Learning in Youth Work. Ten Theses – Yesterday & Today’, IKAB, Bonn.

⁶ Ramberg I. (2009), ‘Intercultural Learning in European Youth Work: Which Ways Forward?’, Council of Europe Publishing, Budapest.

⁷ Roholt R.V. and Baizerman V. (2018) (ed.) Evaluating Civic Youth Work, Oxford: Oxford University Press

⁸ Titley G. (2005), ‘Plastic, Political and Contingent: Culture and Intercultural Learning in Directorate of Youth and Sports activities’, Strasbourg.

9 Vanandruel M.,et al (1996), Young People and Associations in Europe, Council of Europe publishing, Strasbourg, 1996.

¹⁰ Xavier S. (2020, November), ‘Unlearning European Youth Work and disengaging the XXI century liberal democracy dystopia: Possibilities for youth work to challenge and disengage the paradoxical and reproductive nature of liberal democracies’, paper presented at the 2020 Offenburg Talks.