Suchergebnisse

The chapter is a contribution to the socio historical analysis of youth work practices and policies in Italy, with the aim to understand the long-term processes that continued to generate a lack of recognition of this sector by the State and its tendency of non-interference over the private youth work organisations. The model of Hurley and Treacy's (1993) helped in classifying, from a sociological perspective, the different practices of youth work through history in Italy. Based on the socio historical reconstruction detailed in this article, by offering examples of youth work practices in Italy oriented to social change (reformist or revolutionary) or to social regulation objectives (liberal or conservative). Within a general legislative vacuum in national youth policy, there is still no public regulation of a specific professional role for youth workers in Italy, while the different political or religious associations tend to train educators according to their respective ideologies. Except for the unique youth education system created by the fascist regime, youth work in Italy has never been part of an organic public policy at national level. Resistance would seem to have been nourished by two key events apparently not yet metabolised: on one hand, the totalitarian projects of the fascist regime and its experiment of state mass youth education; on the other, the student protests of 1968 and the inability of the state to address its demands for change. The tendency to support a pluralistic private offer of association-based youth work appeared, therefore, to provide a way to prevent the risk of exposing public institutions to new totalitarian youth education political programmes, such as that created by fascism. On the other hand, the public funding of youth work spaces or projects managed by private associations from the early 1980s seems also a strategy to contain those forces of youth protest inherited from the youth movements of the 1960s, having repressed their violent expression during the so-called Years of Lead (the 1970s).

The current formulation of European Union youth policy is not sufficient for a full understanding of what distinguishes youth work from other services or educational practice for young people. Youth work in Europe has a diverse range of fields, goals, and methods of intervention. Such diversification is considered one of the strengths of youth work, inasmuch as it is associated with its ability to adapt to the variety of problems it faces. Such flexibility is, however, likely to generate vagueness in terms of the knowledge of the special contribution expected from youth work and its execution. As a contribution to lead evaluation research to produce empirical evidence about the key-features of youth work, a theoretical framework is presented in this paper that help to identify the peculiar expected outcomes of youth work as well as those mechanisms able to generate them. Specifically, this paper focused on the ability of youth work to affect a more equal distribution of personal development opportunities for the young outside the formal education. For this purpose, sociological theories on non-formal education, educational inequalities and youth participation have been intertwined with psychological research on transition from adolescence to adulthood and with the theory of educational accompaniment in social pedagogy.

The validation of non-formal and informal learning has been part of the European Union political agenda since 2001. The paper presents the results of an action-research project about how the University can reconcile considerations of the strategic value of non-formal and informal knowledge in the perspective of lifelong learning. Specifically, the paper focuses on the Lifelong Learning Centre provided by the University of Bari (Italy) to migrant people and funded by the European Fund for the Integration of non-EU immigrants (EIF). The paper analyses assumptions, approach, outputs and outcomes of the CAP centre conceived as a form of career guidance to help immigrants to actively shape their life course.

This article examines young people's experiences of open access youth work in settings in the UK, Finland, Estonia, Italy and France. It analyses 844 individual narratives from young people which communicate the impact of youthwork on their lives. These accounts are then analysed in the light of the European youth work policy goals. It concludes that it is encouraging that what young people identify as the positive impact of youth work are broadly consistent with many of these goals. There are however some disparities which require attention. These include the importance young people place on the social context of youth work, such as friendship, which is largely absent in EU youth work policy; as well as the importance placed on experiential learning. The paper also highlights a tension between 'top down' policy formulation and the 'youth centric' practices of youth work. It concludes with a reminder to policy makers that for youth work to remain successful the spaces and places for young people must remain meaningful to them 'on their terms'.