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CYC-Online
11 DECEMBER 1999
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YOUTH WORKERS

How can you recognise a youth worker?

Mike Baizerman

I begin this personal view of youthwork with an equally personal view of a youthworker. This is my list of clues for finding actual or potential youthworkers.

Taken together, these are the clues I use to recognise a youthworker in a room of people who work with youth.

In a more formal way, the following constitute one way of understanding what it means to be a youthworker:

* * *

These two sets of notes introduce a personal vision of youthwork and the youthworker. Both can be grounded in a conception of youthwork as a form of education. Education: facilitating the process by which an individual penetrates his taken-for-granted reality and, by so doing, comes to understand how reality for him is constructed. Thus are extended the possibilities of finding moments of/for choice, and, in this, for extending and living his freedom.

Thus youthwork: creating the opportunities for a youth to choose more often about more things in his everyday life and in this way more thoroughly construct himself.

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