Digital Technologies and Youth Work: Opportunities and Challenges for Models and Theory

Digital Technologies and Youth Work: Opportunities and Challenges for Models and Theory

Trudi Cooper, Miriam Rose Brooker, Hilary Tierney, John Sutcliffe
Copyright: © 2020 |Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-2956-0.ch001
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Abstract

Within this chapter the authors explore the implications of ‘digital disruption' for key youth work concepts like friendship, relationship, trust, and community and how changing everyday understandings of these concepts can be, or should be, adopted into youth work theorisation and praxis. Secondly, the authors discuss Freirean critical dialogue and the development of critical consciousness, and how this is challenged by the targeted disinformation found in social media. We argue that micro-targeted disinformation has profound implications for the practice of critical pedagogy. Finally, the authors provide an overview of the opportunities presented by digital technologies, particularly when integrated with existing methods, and some examples of successful practice.
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Background

A continuing challenge for youth work is how to reinterpret theory and practice to retain both social relevance and essential integrity. From a sociological perspective, the category of youth emerged as a result of social changes in response to industrialisation and modernity (Ariès, 1962). Youth work emerged as a distinct occupation, emerged at around the same time (Trudi Cooper, 2018). Internationally, the language used to describe youth work (youth work, social pedagogy, animation, positive youth development) varies considerably between countries. Priorities and practices can be very diverse (Batsleer, 2008). The boundaries between youth work and youth social work are also not uniform, and caution is required to ensure that practices from one culture are not assumed to be universal. However, at the core of youth work, many (including the authors), argue there are some essential features that endure, and are reinterpreted in different contexts, times and places (Cooper, 2018; Schild et al., 2017). One of the authors (Trudi Cooper, 2018) argued that these core features are:

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