RAN Y&E meeting on ‘Education and youth work: towards effective collaboration’ - 8 & 9 April 9.30 - 12.00 CET

For our RAN Youth & Education Working Group meeting on the topic of ‘Education and youth work: towards an effective collaboration’ on 8 and 9 April 2021 we are looking for youth workers, teachers or other educational professionals with experience on cooperation between the field of education and youth work. Practitioners who can provide concrete examples from daily practices, or who experience challenges around this topic, are also invited to respond to this call for participants.

Background and aim of this meeting

Schools are an essential place for young people to learn. If done right, schools and teachers can provide a safe learning climate which promotes resilience towards societal issues like radicalisation and polarisation. Outside school, however, youth workers also have a major opportunity to contribute to the personal development, social integration and active citizenship of young people through all kinds of activities. Both fields have similar roles and opportunities, but might also have different or conflicting approaches. For a holistic P/CVE approach, effective collaboration between both these fields is important.

This meeting builds on the outcomes of the RAN Y&E plenary sessions and previous meetings on digital youth work and youth isolation. It aims to explore the possibilities and opportunities that collaboration between youth work and education might generate, e.g. in terms of building up protective factors for young people vulnerable to radicalisation. We will focus on setting up practical multi-agency structures and collaborative working methods through the exchange of real life examples. Furthermore, this meeting aims to develop a blueprint for schools and youth workers in order to build a culture of cooperation. Outcomes of this meeting will be presented in a conclusions paper that will gather concrete recommendations stemming from daily practice on how to set-up, improve and maintain collaboration between the relevant stakeholders in order to prevent radicalisation more effectively.

Questions that will be discussed during the meeting include:

• What challenges do you face in collaborating with either school or youth work? From what background and country?
• What do both fields bring to the table concerning P/CVE? What are their approaches and/or P/CVE strategies? What is complementary and what differs?
• What can the field of youth work and the educational field learn from each other?
• How to set up effective (and long-term) collaborative structures?
• How should collaboration between practitioners in education and youth look like in the context of practitioners? What are examples of effective collaboration between youth work and education?