INDEX OF QUOTES
 |
Youthwork education and training must focus on how to learn about youth from youth in their terms, so that the youthworker can struggle with accepting them on their terms. This is a basic youthwork value and set of skills. It is also suggestive of the basic youthwork orientation — an anthropology of youth in everyday life. This is the general context for understanding youth – and the particular youth one is with. Note that understanding precedes, in logic and in fact, the processes of youth-changing. Fixing, therapy, intervention are not the basic youthwork task. Indeed, they may have no role in clinical youthwork. The youthwork goal is never to change the youth. It is to join with her in a joint exploration of the possibilities of a relationship. A result will be the natural changes which are an a priori aspect of relationship. But this is not the intention. That is always the walk into possibility. Youth must be understood in context, in situ, as it were. Hence our need of an anthropology of situations and contexts. Ask first horizontal questions about a youth in the context of her friends so as to establish context before asking a vertical question about biography so as to establish a history. |
 |
|