How can you empower young people to lead their own conversations? It is not the youngsters themselves who have to change, but the teacher, facilitator or youth worker, who has to step back. This means creating space for young people to facilitate their own conversations. As an adult, your final task is to step out of the power relationship so that young people can take control of their own agenda.
Estonian Dialogue Academy colleagues Olena Kozmenko and Bart Cosijn delivered two workshops at the seminar “Beyond Polarisations: Youth Renewing Democracy”. The title of our workshop was “A strategy for Youth-led Dialogues”. This seminar brought together youth workers from all over Europe for one week in the Estonian capital Tallinn.
In this workshop, we focused on two key questions:
- How can we encourage young people to set the agenda for dialogue, and how can we help them identify meaningful questions?
- Secondly, how can young people facilitate respectful dialogue that bravely explores complex issues?
We demonstrated how we use the Philosophy with Children and Young People methodology in our work. Participants in the workshop had the opportunity to formulate fundamental questions for dialogue first hand.
The seminar was organised by New Power in Youth in strategic partnership with National Agencies for Erasmus+ and European Solidarity Corps. We thank for facilitating our workshop and Karin Öövel for inviting us and Ainis Kuzņecovs.
