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This article was downloaded by: [Columbia University] On: 06 October 2014, At: 21:44 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Child & Youth Services Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wcys20 Chapter 10: The “Youth” in Youth Civic Engagement Published online: 07 Sep 2008. To cite this article: (2008) Chapter 10: The “Youth” in Youth Civic Engagement, Child & Youth Services, 29:3-4, 139-155, DOI: 10.1300/J024v29n03_10 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J024v29n03_10 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Chapter 10: The “Youth” in Youth Civic Engagement

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This article was downloaded by: [Columbia University]On: 06 October 2014, At: 21:44Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Child & Youth ServicesPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wcys20

Chapter 10: The “Youth” in Youth Civic EngagementPublished online: 07 Sep 2008.

To cite this article: (2008) Chapter 10: The “Youth” in Youth Civic Engagement, Child & Youth Services, 29:3-4, 139-155, DOI:10.1300/J024v29n03_10

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J024v29n03_10

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of theContent. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, andare not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon andshould be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable forany losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use ofthe Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: Chapter 10: The “Youth” in Youth Civic Engagement

Chapter 10

The “Youth” in Youth Civic Engagement

SUMMARY. Reading the formal descriptions of youth civic engagementprojects shows that some emphasize citizenship almost to the exclusionof young person, while others emphasize young people to the exclusionof citizenship. Who and what are the youth, the young people and youngpersons in the three youth civic engagement initiatives? And how arethese conceptions brought together with conceptions of citizen? Citizen isoften explicitly or implicitly age-graded, with laws and practices re-stricting young people from authentic and consequential civic engagement.Data are used to suggest that interest in public issues is also age-graded. Sotoo are structures of opportunity for young people to be authenticallyinvolved in public issues in public groups and organizations. These issuesare examined through the lens of chronological age as used in develop-mental and constructionist conceptions of youth and then these perspec-tives are used to read youth civic engagement. doi:10.1300/J024v29n03_10[Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Ser-vice: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]>Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2007 by The Haworth Press. Allrights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Youth, adolescents, teenagers, metaphor, youth culture,social role

[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “The “Youth” in Youth Civic Engagement.” Roholt, Ross VeLure,R. W. Hildreth, and Michael Baizerman. Co-published simultaneously in Child & Youth Services (TheHaworth Press) Vol. 29, No. 3/4, 2007, pp. 139-155; and: Becoming Citizens: Deepening the Craft of YouthCivic Engagement (Ross VeLure Roholt, R. W. Hildreth, and Michael Baizerman) The Haworth Press,2007, pp. 139-155. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The HaworthDocument Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].

Available online at http://cys.haworthpress.com© 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1300/J024v29n03_10 139

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Youth civic engagement (YCE) is ostensibly about youth–adoles-cents, teenagers, young people, students–in some of the many scientificand everyday words used to name and categorize persons who are chro-nologically about 12-22 years old. Because youth civic engagement isabout young people, at least in part, we explore here this obvious,taken-for-granted but, ultimately, complex notion. This is done by read-ing YCE through the lens of youth and reading youth through the lens ofYCE. Throughout, we use data from our study of Public Achievement(PA) in the United States (Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Wisconsin),in Northern Ireland and, in this chapter, from Palestine (Gaza and theWest Bank), where it is called Popular Achievement.

READING YCE THROUGH THE LENS OF YOUTH

Is YCE really about youth and young people? It depends on who youask. To its founder, Harry Boyte, and to many political activist andpolitical theorists, PA in particular and YCE in general are about democ-racy, civic life, and citizenship in the future and (almost less so) in thepresent. It is about preparing young people to be reflective, nonviolent,just and active life-long citizens in their community and country. This isthe classic notion of youth (youthhood) as a time of “preparation” for“real-life” and adulthood. Later we examine whether this so-called“psychosocial moratorium,” which is presented as a “developmental”imperative or need, that is, genetically and biologically driven, is indeedthis or whether instead this is a perspective or, better, an ideology thatsupports a particular conception of the life-course (not the life-cycle),as institutionalized in the United States and in much of the West andNorth.

This conception of adolescence and youthhood too easily misses thecrucial developmental, sociopolitical and personal importance for youngpeople of viable, authentic, meaningful and efficacious involvementnow, during their youth, for both their current and future well-being andfor the well-being of community and polity.

Notice that in the previous paragraph we added the present to the futureand added the presumptive value of participation to the young person, notonly to citizen politics, civic society and democracy. It is precisely thisinterest in youth as such which is not found in the work of most polit-ical activists and theoreticians (while it is seen at times political scienceresearch); there is some attention by writers in these traditions to youthactivism and youth social movements, that is, group political action in the

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present, with youth as youth. To those interested in young people, thereis a substantial literature on their activism and civic engagement, fromboth social change and educational perspectives. Much depends on theauthor’s conception of youth.

WHAT IS “YOUTH”?

There are several everyday words for those aged 12-22 years: youth,adolescent, young person, teenager, student and employee, for example.Each is used in everyday talk and some are also in scientific discoursewhere they also have technical meanings. There are many language-gamesfor the use of these terms–everyday and technical and the many dif-ferent spheres of the everyday–family, friends, neighborhood, school,health, and the like, and to make this even more complex, there are alsomany different technical domains such as medicine, education, em-ployment, and justice in which these words about young people take onspecific meaning and their own rules for use.

Below these words and their everyday and technical uses are twobasic, different, yet complementary sociocultural, political, economic,and scientific conceptions of this chronological age and of persons ofage: One is biogenetic and the other is broadly social. In the UnitedStates, in general, and in the academy and the helping professions, thedominant paradigm is development and age (Baars, Hendricks, & Visser,2007). The former is the overarching theory of human growth driven byhuman population and individual genetics (and thus biology, neurology,biochemistry, and the like) in social context and the latter is a unit ofmeasure, typically in years; individuals live chronological age and areassessed to be a developmental age. This biogenetic model of humanbeing over its life-span is biologically reductive, natural, that is, “theway things are” in nature, and our “best science.” Typically, this sci-entific model names persons in the chronological age-range 12-19 asadolescents and frames them in bio-psycho-social terms as adolescents.Such individuals are understood as located in a life-cycle, itself dividedinto “stages,” one of which is adolescence, which is subdivided intoearly, middle and late. The body, cognitive structure and function,personality and even social behavior are, broadly speaking, attributedto “development” and, in the hands of its best practitioners, to develop-ment-in-context of history, place, society, culture, family, neighborhood,friends, and other people, institutions and realities of the near to farenvironment.

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The second broad perspective on this chronological age begins withthis social and cultural context and seeks to understand how it workslocally to globally to create and use age-groups and so-called traits orcharacteristics said to be typical of individuals whose bodies have beenalive a certain length of time. Writing this last phrase as we did wasintentional; to invite you to consider Hockey and James’ (2003) anthro-pological insight that age is a way that society’s mark the passage oftime; that is, age is a social fact invented and used politically, culturallyand socially as part of the way groups, communities and societies organizethe socially constructed life-course (Gubrium, Holstein, & Buckholdt,1994); that is, the biogenetically driven life-cycle of birth to death isgiven social form and social meaning: Infancy, childhood, (Jenks,1996) and “old age” (Katz, 1996) are sociocultural, political, and eco-nomic categories used to make sense of natural biodevelopmentalchanges in individuals. Since time as such does not cause change(Lesko, 2001), the natural science model must explain these changes inother terms; this it does showing how chemical and other similar pro-cesses work. From this level, they move upwards to the cell and onwardsto the individual and then to the age-group–youth. Biology is real; thedevelopmental is a metaphoric organization of this. There is nothing“natural” about these categories, although it is interesting that suchchronological age conceptions, while differing in specifics, seem to bequite consistent across history, place, and culture (Qvortrup, Bardy, Sgritta,& Wintersberger, 1994). There is less consistency about life-stages acrosshistory and society because of changes in economies, family-life, andthe like.

In this second family of broad social conceptions of youth, primacy isgiven both to the local, i.e., around here or in that community (Cresswell,2004), as well as to the societal. This is true for legal definitions, for ex-ample, the so-called “age of maturity” at 18 or 21 in general, with “legalage” depending on activity such as obtaining a driver’s license, drinkingalcohol in a pub, having the right to be married or the right to medicalcare without parental notification.

In its clearest forms, those who use these broadly sociopolitical andeconomic conceptions of the age category “youth” argue that while thebiological is real, potent and consequential, it is in the social organizationof these biological facts where youth is constructed as a meaningful socialcategory and social reality, with real-world consequences for the society,this age-group as such, individuals of this age, and the relations betweenthis age-group and other, e.g., adults (parents, teachers, police) and

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child (no longer a child; now a teenager). Let’s now ground the philo-sophical and theoretical with an example from YCE.

The Developmental and Youth Civic Engagement

Using the bio-developmental model, YCE is about adolescents beingtaught in age-appropriate ways the knowledge, attitudes, and skills forlife-long active citizenship, particularly about voting and keeping “in-formed” about civic issues. Given their stage of cognitive and relatedethico-moral development, the most effective (i.e., proven) way to teachthese is a, b and c. For example, given what is known about adolescence,it is likely to be more effective if the teaching is done in age-segregatedpeer groups, with adolescents chosen for groups based on their peer rela-tionships within and outside the school. Learning should be organizedin group settings, with intensity (time per week), duration (weeks in a year)taken into account (Eyler & Giles, 1999). What does the best develop-mental science say?

Scientific developmental reasons may be given as to why such an effortis important to the adolescent at this life-stage; social context may beadded too, with a value statement on the importance of such preparationfor the vitality of democracy. Note the obvious that the ideas of citizenand democracy, non-violence, and social justice and equity are socialand personal values, and the applied development approach put its sciencein the service of these values and also in the service of a value-based con-ception of adolescent, indeed, of adolescent-in-the-context-of a democraticideal.

Is there anything wrong with this, anything troubling about it? In onesense, not at all, because here is applied science being used in responseto a meaningful social issue, and it is being used in ways in which thescience serves the social value of citizen democracy. In another per-spective, this approach is problematic in that its conceptions of adoles-cent need, competence, and healthy development are not value neutral,scientific terms. Rather they are value-laden and moral. If the applieddevelopment model of adolescent is itself a moral perspective as well asa scientific construct, then a model of YCE based in applied develop-mental science is another moral conception which must be read andtaken as such and, as such, must compete on those terms with other suchmoral conceptions. That is, this is not about a scientifically proven andtrue model of adolescence and adolescent civic engagement versus amoral/value-based model, with the former taken as more potent because

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it is scientific. Rather it is about different moral conceptions, each seek-ing social, public and scholarly legitimacy by using different claims.

Another problem with the applied developmental approach is far lessrational, indeed comes close to being heard as at least non-rational, ifnot irrational. We have trouble with the mechanical-like, the techno-logical-like, aesthetic of this approach, its apparent orderliness andcleanliness with none of the subtlety, confusion, passion and variationthat we find among persons, especially when they are seen as person-in-the-world-of-everyday life. In the tumult of the everyday, the sci-ence seems not only technological but also sterile, incomplete, simplis-tic, and, in effect but not in the intent of its practitioners, classist, racist,sexist, ahistorical, and simply naive. Indeed, if YCE is about broad con-ceptions of the civic, of politics, of citizen and of involvement, of partic-ipation and engagement, the applied perspective, model and technologyis anything but when used in practice. It is adult truth in the service ofadult goals, primarily. This is politics! It is about interests, power, andlegitimacy.

All of this is in tension with the dream that science could be usedeffectively to “make society better” and individuals happier, less painedand more effective in their everyday lives. It is not the goal of science assuch that we find troublesome but how it has too often been used asideology and technology.

READING YCE THROUGH YOUTH

Applied development is grounded in a scientific conception of theyoung person as adolescent, and its approach to civic engagement isthrough this scientific construct. A contesting conception, youth, isbroadly social, political, economic, and time/place-specific, focused onthe now, the emergent and the future, adulthood and old age. In thisframe, civic engagement has benefit now and later for both young per-son and community (civic life). Reading YCE through the lens of youth,it is clear at once that there are more flexible chronological age markersfor this age-group in contrast to firmer and less flexible age-limits forthe scientific adolescent. Second, scientific adolescence is a universal,while youth is time/place and population-bound: local, actual definitionof youth counts most, and these are given by neighborhood, friend andgroup. To both conceptions, context matters, but differently. Youth is acontext-based conception while adolescence is not. A third difference isthat adolescence/adolescent are scientific terms and, as such, are presented

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as value-neutral, while youth is an explicitly social term and as such cannot escape implicit and explicit valuational, moral, and socio-culturalmeanings. Fourth, the applied scientific has an empirically proven tech-nology for enhancing adolescent development in the social domain ofcivic life, while those working under the banner of “healthy youth de-velopment”–a moral frame with (applied) science overtones. Both usethe same theory and research findings, with youth development practi-tioners adding in local flavor and realities. In contrast, those who are activein the civic and political realms see youth as workers (needing trainingand supervision) of a certain age, given in years: first worker, then age.Another typical reading of youth in that gaze is as member while othersare activist, volunteer, and citizen. By referring to social role and not tobirth age, these conceptions serve to highlight the place and contribu-tion of the person over her body age. Of course, in the realities of a pro-ject and other life-contexts, age as such is usually embedded, e.g.,student, young activist, student activist. In contrast to scientific devel-opmental modes of reading and meaning where a particular age means aparticular set of (likely) capacities, with youth in social roles, while thereality may be the same, it is perceived and spoken about programmat-ically as in having to train and supervise young workers in differentways than older workers. On the other side, these non-scientific perspec-tives emphasize “the positive” characteristic of “young people”–theirinquisitiveness, energy, enthusiasm, commitment, passion, and persever-ance, for example. Obviously, these too are age-graded and implicitlydevelopmental but are treated as commonsense, as folk-knowledge, notas science, and thus these claim a different legitimacy.

YCE is about politics broadly put, and the knowledge, attitudes, andskills needed for effective social action for social change, on the scalelocal to international. Effective social activists of all ages learn and usethese. Older activists have more opportunity to learn and use these. Thosewith more activist experience are likely better at this work than most be-ginners. Again, age and time show up as natural, real, and meaningfulthemes in YCE where these are treated as activities and tasks to be un-dertaken as in training and preparing workers. What most adult activ-ists have more of than most youth activists is more experience (age/time) and more experiences of a certain type–activist experiences.The ideal adult activist has learned from involvements and is a moreeffective worker in, for example, running meetings, analyzing situationsand problems, setting goals, imagining likely effective strategies, andthe like. Most young people have fewer of these experiences, knowl-edge, and skills. Depending on the organization, initiative or project and

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its philosophy and practices, it may be decided that the more experiencedmust train, watch-over, and evaluate the beginners and the less able.

How to train youth to be civic activists, now and life-long? This is apedagogical question that adolescent developmentalists work out usingtheir science of learning. This is also basic in YCE. Indeed, in school-basedinitiatives such as PA in the US, in Northern Ireland and in some sites inPalestine, training-for and training-in civic engagement is the majoreffort. It is typically carried-out as experiential learning where thelearning-about and the learning-how-to are joined to action on a group-decided project. Evaluation may also be an inextricable practice in thisprocess, with the goal of improving practice to more likely and con-sistently meet project goals. In contrast, in adolescent developmentevaluation, focus is on change in the individual young person’s de-velopmental status, that is, cognition, moral reasoning, and also skillmastery. In youth civic engagement, the latter is also assessed. Undergrantor pressure, distortion is very often brought to YCE in the require-ment that evaluation include individual change read in developmentaland school terms (e.g., grades, attendance) rather than in sociopoliticalterms as effective worker. YCE has great interest also in changes in theirparticipants, but their preferred focus is on their beliefs, understanding,and knowledge about democracy, citizenship, and citizen work. Whenthis is assessed, as we and others have done (Hildreth, Baizerman, &VeLure Roholt, 2001; VeLure Roholt, Hildreth, & Baizerman, 2003), theresults are clear: Most young people did not have a substantive grasp ofthese concepts and lived-realities before or after their involvement.We think this is because the projects did not focus on this and that thestudents were neither taught this material fully and systematically norused it in their group or individual reflections. It is the very absence ofthis content, this rationale for the PA praxis, this democratic philosophythat opens the space for other overarching conceptions of the work andsources of legitimacy for it. One socially, culturally, and politicallynormative frame is “causing and helping” such as a human servicelanguage and way of making sense. Also available because it is part ofschool culture is the frame of “my friends”; “they’re doing it and I wantto be with them so I’ll do it.” A third school culture account is learning:“It seems interesting and I may learn from it, ‘get something out ofit.’” And, always, “I’ll do it because it will look good on my collegeapplication.” Just a reminder that these and other such accounts aside,participants may still come to understand, enjoy, even master citizenways-of-being, continue their involvement on local public issues and,indeed, become life-long active citizens. This opens the evaluative

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question of whether young people who take on this mode of beingcalled citizen but who do not have a civic account for their lived-actionsare to be understood as showing a positive outcome of an YCE initiative. Isone a success only if she shows both action and (the correct) account?

From a different angle, reading YCE through the lens of youth andyoung people suggests that their most valid account may be the onethat belongs to their world of meanings, whether or not it is what theproject teaches and wants to hear back from them. It may be the mostimportant insight of reading YCE through youth, youthhood, youngpeople and YCE setting (e.g., school, youth club, community center) isthat young people’s frames and ways of making sense of their involve-ment may be in a different realm and in a different language than thosewho conceive, design, implement, manage, and evaluate actual YCEprojects: they do it on adult terms and make sense of it on their terms.This is about “youth culture” and, more important, about site-specificyouth subculture and life-style enclaves, and schools are a primary siteof such youth worlds. Those closest to the participants typically knowsomething, if not a lot, about these worlds and groups and their inter-pretative paradigms–how meaning is constructed, diffused, sustainedand changed. They have much to tell about how YCE works in thatspace, as do the youth who are involved. They must be asked to makesense of YCE on their terms, as well as using those required by thesponsor, the site or the evaluators:

A duck by any other name. . . .

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and eats like a duck. . . .

READING YOUTH THROUGH YCE

If reading YCE through a youth lens reminds us to pay attention tothe young people and their ways of making and sustaining meaning andmeaningfulness, reviewing this and reading youth through a YCE lensopens up the conceptions of youth, young person, youthhood, adoles-cent, student and worker. The two readings disclose related insights.

The ideal young person in YCE initiatives may be the adolescent, thescientific young person, who thinks and acts and lives as an adolescent,in ways laid-out in the scientific model of adolescence and found inempirical research on persons at this life-stage and with a certain chro-nological age: “She is like this and given what we want to accomplish

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with her, she is more likely to do it if we carry it out this way.” This is anexample of applied adolescent development. Such an approach wouldtake into account, for example, the setting to be worked in, the adultsemployed there, and her peers.

Actual young people are not scientific adolescents; instead they arein and of everyday worlds, albeit embodied in ways made partially clearby developmental and related science, with brains that work in waysmade partially clear. A recent court case legitimizes scientific findingsabout the adolescent brain (Boyd, 2006), challenging socio-moral notionsof responsibility (Ortiz, 2004). In the end, however, it is in the particu-larities that YCE (and life) go on: these particular young people in thisparticular group in this particular school at this historical moment.To understand YCE in general is to first understand it in its particulars;to understand youth and young person, student and citizen, it is first tounderstand these social roles as a way for understanding individualpersons.

In other words, adolescent is a scientific construct, an abstraction, ageneralization applied to a particular class of persons or to an individ-ual. Youth is a social role, the incumbent of which is an individual,actual young person. YCE is about both of these. The first insight fromreading youth through YCE is to realize that there are three readingsnecessary:

• What does YCE disclose about youth, the social role and symbol,metaphor, representation?

• What does YCE disclose about being and doing oneself as a youth?• What does YCE disclose about those individuals who see them-

selves and call themselves youth, young person, teen, student, andthe rest?

Social Role

There are macro and micro levels here. On the macro level, youth associal role refers to ways of doing and being certain ages, typically12-22 years. Youth is the carrying out and age-graded social expecta-tions about thinking, feelings, talking, acting, dressing, playing andthe rest. Social roles are space/time specific, so what a youth is andhow “youth” is to be done must be grounded to place and history–here/now: Baker High School, 2004; the Crow Nation, Montana, 1986, forexample.

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In this view, citizen is a social role subject to the same rules of speci-ficity. So too student and worker, teacher and leader. YCE says thatwhat it means to be a youth participant depends–on local specifications.There is no single, universal way to do youth or citizen or participant oryouth leader. For example:

• Being in a PA group and meeting with the school principal aboutsafety in the building

• Volunteering in a nursing home• Being an Eagle Scout• Taking your nephews fishing• Voting in school elections

One YCE project in the U.S. was run out of a community center bysomeone active in a particular religious-political philosophy and church.Those who were youth and citizens in his initiative did this in ways fardifferent than anywhere else we evaluated. Their conception of youthwas one who will be taught, their conception of student was unquestion-ing learner, and their conception of citizen was doing what you weretold to do. This is the easy to grasp insight, one almost commonsensicalnow. Less so is the next insight.

Being and Doing Oneself as Youth

If youth as such is a social category, individuals perform, carry-out,and take on these social expectations; they become the role in the theat-rical, performative sense. What is the experience and meaning to selfand others of being and doing oneself as youth? (as student, a teenager,etc.). When I do youth. When I (do) (am) citizen. This perspective attendsto the person doing the social role and, related, being the social role and,more radically, being who one is–herself. This is not just we are ourroles but is, since we may be our many roles (some more than others),there is not a single me, but instead I am many.

How I do/am youth in one time/place setting may seem to fit or notwith how I am/do youth in another. So too with citizen. And I may seemdifferent being/doing student than being/doing citizen, worker, andyouth. This is the self in post-modernity (Schrag, 1997). And this is aconception of person/self/being that is radically discontinuous with theolder views of the self–the single unitary self. In earlier times, there wassaid to be a tighter, even better, fit between and among the social roles

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one took and one’s self. The self then was seen as unitary then, now tothe postmodernist, it is multiple (Schrag, 1997).

In practical terms, “bad kids” can take on and do great citizen workfor their neighborhood; students with poor grades who have trouble withclass readings may read civic engagement materials with less difficultly:Same kid, same brain, different world–different kid, as it were–to someextent. We interviewed many young people who found little value inschool, goofed-off and screwed around and were taken and treated asproblems, yet who flourished in an YCE initiative. This is an old storybut one worth remembering as experiential learning programs becomeless available, more restrictive in admission and for the academic andbehavioral elite, while the others work on basics. Not to be lost iswhether and how YCE can be differently meaningful and powerful formany young persons as a way to do and be a youth. YCE is a good op-portunity to explore worlds and, in so doing, explore how to name andthen live-out one’s self and also to integrate these selves into a dominantidentity and personality. YCE can be such a field of exploration andplay in the crafting of self (Melucci, 1996).

Youth and Others

To call oneself a youth, to experience one’s body, time/space andothers in this way is to be and to do youth. In the social world of others,they have to accept these performances if they are to see, react, and relateto that person as a young person, as a youth. What they think and whatand how they act on that basis matters to that person, to them in theirmutual worlds, and to the larger social order. This general point be-comes particularly important in the context of school and in other socialenvironments where age expectations are clear, patrolled and, if vio-lated, challenged: Act your age! is not only the title of a very good book(Lesko, 2001), it is also a raw and tough sociomoral reminder to stay inone’s appropriate age-role. Another common phase and book title isHow Old are You? (Chudacoff, 1989), the two phrases (and books)show how chronological age is part of many social roles.

The insight is seen best in the case of citizen, the social role. In thesociolegal realm, citizen is specified by age as in the case of voting andcriminal ( juvenile) law; there is a minimum for the former and bothminimum and maximum ages for the latter. Beyond that, little aboutcitizen is age-specific. Could it be that it is this very absence of age ref-erents contributes to adults not inviting young people into the citizenrole, with some small exceptions, in schools, religious congregations,

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and neighborhood groups and clubs? Leadership in these is typicallyage-segregated, with youth excluded. No wonder youth is thought toneed preparation; they are kept from the everyday and specializedlearning that would come from their everyday involvement. A remedy?Train them. Another remedy? Involve them in authentic, meaningfuland viable ways in the full spectrum of the community’s everydaysociopolitical life. Why does this seem an odd idea to adults? In partbecause a younger chronological age means less experience, means lesswisdom, means not yet ready. Inextricably part of all of this is youth asimage–the teenager, the adolescent, not yet with capacity to take onsuch serious work, the work of communal living, public work–citizen.This thinking about youth is often not self-aware, because youth–thesymbol, image, representation, metaphor–is so deeply in sociocultural,political and economic language and imagery that it is taken-for-grantedand treated as natural (Baizerman, 1998; Lesko, 2001).

Making the exclusion of young people an even more powerful argu-ment is recent biophysiological research and court rulings citing it onthe adolescent brain and its capacities and limitations, such as high levelreasoning and decision-making (Boyd, 2006).

Another View

YCE offers a direct and potent challenge to this perspective on andline of reasoning about youth. Our evaluations show unequivocally thatmost young people, when invited to take on the substantive, meaningful,viable and real social role of citizen, do so with competence and integ-rity by being invited, supported, and supervised. We have found thatyoung people in school can cross age-graded, sex-specific role expec-tations and carry out the citizen role, not only in age-appropriate waysbut, more importantly, in role-appropriate ways. They do citizen as acitizen would, not as a youth would! The exclusion of young peoplefrom citizen roles is not natural, nor is it based on a natural or abiochemical or neurological fact: exclusion is a sociopolitical decisionand act, which at times use the natural, the biophysiological, the devel-opmental as a moral account for this exclusion.

The history of the idea of youth (Mitterauer, 1986) and of young people(Levi & Schmitt, 1997) is the documentation of their increasing mar-ginalization from their community’s everyday life to a age-populationsegregated into age-specific ghettos such as schools, sport and recre-ation clubs, youth programs and the like. The misuse of folk wisdomand developmental science provide the account: involvement must be age

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appropriate and meet the test of readiness. Activities are age-segregated,with a resulting age-homogeneity in most social institutions so thatyoung people of the same age are found together. Then it is said thatsimply by looking, it is easy to see how alike they are. This is becausethey are at the same developmental stage, it is said. Could it be thatpeople who are segregated together for very long periods come to looklike and be like each other?

Youth and Others

YCE discloses limitations and distortions in the developmental scienceconception of adolescent (Morss, 1996) by showing that properly pre-pared and supervised young people can take on and perform the citizenrole in ways thought not possible simply because of their age. Someexamples:

• Young people at a private, urban school worked for three years todesign and build a new school playground. This required themlearning planning code and arguing their case with the mayor andcity council. In the end, the research and data they presented couldnot be contested.

• Kindergarten students at a public urban school worked together toget more equipment for their playground and their elementary gym.

• Older young people at an urban public school used local media toget the city to clean-up a vacant lot in their neighborhood and thendeveloped the lot into a park.

Not too long ago, it was generally believed than African-Americans didnot have the capacity to do the same work as Asians or Caucasians;women could not do men’s work. These and so many more examples ofsociopolitical, economic, legal and everyday classism, racism, sexismand the rest show social exclusion. Is youth our new excluded population?

Many political regimes fear their young people and work at co-optingthem in governmental youth movements (Heer, 1974), lest the youth getorganized and become a political force in society and politics. In othersocieties, these sociopolitical processes of marginalization, segregation,and cooptation result in the fact that young people spend lots of timetogether, thus creating a market and a youth culture (Mallan & Pearce,2003). Both work to support keeping young people out of the workereconomy and in the consumer economy, resulting in freeing jobs forolder workers (Mizen, 2004). Consumer economy works to create and

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sustain worlds in which young people look, act, and are youth. Once soperceived by adults, they are taken as too young and not yet ready foradult roles such as citizen. Around and around this goes, the evidencefrom YCE projects unknown, marginal, little used, essentially irrelevantto the larger issues about the state of youth, the condition of youth, theyouth questions (Cohen, 1997).

CONCLUSION

Youth as idea, image, metaphor, symbol, and representation as wellas population-group and individual is a complex term used and reducedin everyday life to a few simple meanings. The technical, the subtle, thedifferent angels of understanding and the poetry of intentional, thought-ful and crafted use cannot be heard over the loudspeakers used bymerchants and politicians, by experts in adolescence and adolescents,and their normal development and typical problems. Youth as a wordmay be little used among persons that age in self-referral or in referringto these age-groups or their generation. Youth in the end may be anadult term used by them to refer to them. But youthhood is a fact of so-cial life, and developmental changes in body and brain are facts of bio-logical life. More complicated is how these two perspectives work intandem and in opposition. Current efforts at genetic level explanation,seen by some as biologically reductive, are gaining scientific supportand are being used politically to categorize, marginalize, segregate anddemonize adolescents, youth and young persons. This use is dema-gogic, although most of its practitioners are seemingly well-meaning,seeking to better the condition of youth, to support their “full flourish-ing” and to prepare them for full, vital and viable roles as adults andcitizens.

YCE as a praxis challenges dogmatic assertions based in science,philosophy, politics or folk wisdom that young people do not have thecapacity or are unable or are unwilling to take on substantive socialroles while they are and are seen as youth–as persons 12-22 years oldand as young people. They indeed have the capacity, ability and will-ingness to be citizens now and into their adulthood and old age. YCEdiscloses these facts and supports them with anecdote and other narrativeevidence.

Who wants to listen?

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