Grounding Young People Pathways Through Community Resilient Approaches

Author(s):

Sofia Marques da Silva(presenting / submitting)Ana Milheiro Silva

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

05. Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

05 SES 03,

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-22

17:15-18:45

Room:

W2.11

Chair:

David Zimmermann

Contribution

Grounded in a long term research (2010-2018) on young people growing up in border regions, in which sense of belonging, engagement and resilience have been the most relevant conceptual organisers to understand young people educational pathways and transitions, this paper will address the understanding of community as a resourceful (MacKinnon&Derickson, 2013) social space to foster youth well-being.

Border regions in Portugal, which are at the same time rural and, in many cases, remote, young people are facing specific obstacles in transitions to adulthood and in developing positive educational pathways. The research question underlying this paper is to understand how communities in border regions are responding locally to global challenges and promoting young people engagement and sense of belonging?

There are many elements that can work as promising roots of resilience, namely community dynamic interactive processes (Kulig, 2000) and networking practices that can contribute to encourage prospering behaviours and foster young people capacity to critically navigate obstacles.

We understand resilience beyond the individual level and life events based perspective and more as a process depending on contextual factors. It is based on this that we understand the relevance not only to analyse what type of opportunities, resources and tools are available, in this case at community level, but also how young people relate to it and give meaning (Ungar, 2011). Ungar (2011; 2012) and his ecological understanding of resilience is a consistent reference included in our theoretical framework as he considers that when studying resilience we need to involve context first and individuals second. We are, however, aware of limits in the ecological approach, as an imported concept, when addressing social relations (MacKinnon&Derickson, 2013). Therefore, we understand the role of community resilient approaches as processes in changing and challenging problems not only by responding through adaptation/learning models but by embracing a strategy to respond, disrupt and influence systemic change (Magis, 2010).

Research on resilient communities in Portugal, in the education field, is a under-explored area (research with the key words as resilience, communities; resilient communities in the open access scientific repository). This paper aims to contribute to foreground a deeper analysis on what could be facilitators mechanisms and approaches towards resilient communities, as social networks that empower, value youth and foster young pathways. By doing this we are also contributing to shift the study on resilience from the individual approach to a context approach, but also from a perspective that just considers that communities as to be developed to become adjustable as well as their population to a perspective that considers that the system can’t remain undisturbed.

In this paper we decided to investigate, through document and discourse analysis, the role of specific community organisations as municipalities and their youth centred bodies, as Municipal Youth Council is an example.

In October 2016 the Portuguese Government defined the development of inlands of Portugal, border regions included, as a priority. The National Plan for Territorial Cohesion is sustained by a previous diagnoses that shows the asymmetrical development of the country, namely in what concerns low population density and high number of young people that every year leave their home regions. This diagnoses was an input to civil society and government to discuss the demand of different strategies and development policies specifically for these regions increasing opportunities for their populations, some of them focusing in young people. Understanding how municipalities and youth-centred bodies have profiled their role towards youth development in their regions is a necessary research. Resourcefull communities with resilient approaches are not those just transforming people into adaptable individuals, rather making counter-proposal toward social changes and justice.

Method

This paper draws on a mix methods approach project on Young People, Education and Border Regions, developed in Portugal (Silva, 2014) in a very particular time covering pre to post crisis in Portugal. It allowed to understand young people’ and their communities’ strategies to cope with structural (like remoteness) and trend (economic crisis, unemployment) difficulties. Following Ungar’s perspective, this long-term approach is also relevant to better understand resilience as “individuals move between contexts and through time” (Ungar, 2011: 7). This project is a 10 years project including a exploratory phase (one case study, that included in situ ethnography and a questionnaire); a follow up phase (included a case study with online ethnography and a questionnaire); a solidification phase (expansion at national level with a questionnaire and 4 case-studies). Results from phase one and two have been clear in showing the relevance of school-community networking processes to enhance the quality of young people lives, to promote their sense of belonging, school engagement and resilience, from a ecological perspective (Adger, 2000; Ungar, 2011). The third phase, at national level, comprises a preparatory procedure that includes the analysis of referential documents from schools and community (municipalities and their youth-centred bodies, youth organizations, etc.). In this paper we will focus on communities resilient approaches by analysing specific documentation as official programmes of Municipalities and their Youth-related bodies. Organisations’ documents are a source of data and constitute “a product of the context in which they were produced and therefore grounded in real world” (Merriam, 1998: 126). In profiling community-based approaches, the review of documents was sensitive to resilience approaches indicators and to regional factors. We analysed approximately 60 official documents from 52 municipalities covering all continental border regions of Portugal. We conducted document analysis doing a systematic and comparative analysis and using conceptual dimensions, being the most relevant to this paper: local government model approach to youth problems; type of problems underlying different approaches; regional sensitive youth policies. The next step is to triangulate the document analysis research with empirical data coming from questionnaires and case studies in which we can see how young people understand their communities’ role to promote better opportunities, to include them in local decisions and shape their participation and negotiation capacity. This document analysis allowed us to be aware of divergent processes across and inside regions and is a contribution to a multilevel analysis of local resilience approaches and portraits.

Expected Outcomes

Findings suggest that municipalities have youth-focused interests and concerns, accounting for different approaches operating in each region. However, from 52 municipalities only 20 address significantly youth in official documents and through their youth-centred bodies. Some contexts have a reciprocity perspective on how youth problems should be addressed. Underlying this position is a belief that by investing in young people and safeguarding their growing up experiences the community will be fuelling local future development. However, in most of the cases we found municipalities addressing policies more related with the provision of opportunities to participate rather than a reciprocity policy (Bolzan&Gale, 2016), in which “connectedness is mutual, not merely received but reciprocated as well” (Whitlock, 2007). Document and discourse analysis provided us with information regarding regions in which municipalities are organising their action to make young people cope with local-global challenges, suggesting that is more concerned with the stability of the system, by generating opportunities for young people to adapt (MacKinnon& Derickson, 2013), rather than to develop a strategy for change, namely by anticipating alternatives. Other regions are sharply addressing youth problems, as unemployment, school drop-out, while others focus on protective structural measures after specific vulnerabilities were identified. We found some examples of addressing young people issues as a collective and collaborative responsibility sustained in a networking approach (Hadfield et al., 2006; Costa et al., 2016); in other cases we found organisations playing leaders or leadership developers. However, while young people discourses addressing their relationship with their youth and growing up processes are always very much attached to their sense of belonging to the region, most of the municipalities and youth-centred bodies seem to be detached from specific factors that youth from border regions and rural areas face while piloting local-global inequalities and challenges.

References

Adger, N. W. (2000). Social and ecological resilience: Are they related?, Progress in Human Geography, 24, 347-366. Bolzan, Natalie; Gale, Fran (2016) Social resilience: transformations in two Australian communities facing chronic adversity, International Social Work, 1-14. DOI: 10.1177/0020872816673888. Costa, Ana Marisa, Silva; Silva, Sofia Marques da; Araújo, Helena C. (2016) Networking in education: from concept to action – An analytical view on the Educational Territories of Priority Intervention (TEIP) in Northern Portugal. Improving Schools, 1-14. Hadfield, Mark, Jopling, Michael, Noden, Christopher, O’Leary, Ducan, & Scott, Alison (2006). What does the existing knowledge base tell us about the impact of networking and collaboration? A review of network-based innovations in education in the UK. Nottingham: National College for school-leadership. Kulig, J. C. (2000). Community resiliency: The potential for community health nursing theory develop- ment. Public Health Nursing, 17, 374-385. Magis K. (2010) ‘Community Resilience: An Indicator of Social Sustainability’, Society & Natural Resources 23(5): 401–16. MacKinnon, D.; Derikson, K. (2012) From resilience to resourcefulness. A critique of resilience policy and activism, Progress in Human Geography, 37 (2), 253-270. Merriam S. B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Silva, Sofia Marques da. (2014). Growing up in a Portuguese boderland. In Spyros Spyroum & Miranda Christou (Eds.), Children and borders (pp. 62-78). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ungar M. (2011) The social ecology of resilience: Addressing contextual and cultural ambiguity of a nascent construct, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 81(1): ) 1–17. Ungar, M. (2012). Social Ecologies and Their Contribution to Resilience. In M. Ungar (Ed.), The Social Ecology of Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Practice (13-31). New York: Springer Whitlock J. (2007) ‘The Role of Adults, Public Space, and Power in Adolescent Community Connectedness’, Journal of Community Psychology 35(4): 499–518.

Author Information

Sofia Marques da Silva (presenting / submitting)

University of Porto, Portugal

Ana Milheiro Silva