RAN Y&E - Tools for post-lockdown resilience-building in youth

Background and aim of this meeting

Youth professionals are confronted with the consequences of the many lockdowns young people faced. The isolation during these periods led to a lack of socialisation, which is now visible in the classroom and in youth organisations, where pupils are reported to have more difficulties with respectfully interacting with each other. The lack of face-to-face contact of their pupils resulted in a lack of constructive social and communicative skills, as well as emotional resilience. Class discussions for example tend to quickly escalate, which increases polarisation within the classroom, and by extent, in wider society. This enhances young peoples’ vulnerability to feelings of misunderstanding and social isolation, which are risk factors for extremist and also criminal recruitment.

Practitioners thus face challenges in ‘resocialising’ these youngsters towards more mutual respect, empathy and resilience. During the RAN Practitioners Plenary, several aspects were defined as essential for youth practitioners to focus on in the coming time:

• Conflict resolution;
• Multi-perspectivity;
• Democratic literacy;
• Emotional resilience;
• Critical thinking;
• Proper personal engagement between practitioner and pupil.

During this meeting, we will look into these concepts in depth, focus on common challenges, and formulate recommendations on how to properly implement these in the daily practice of a teacher or youth worker. Moreover, we will present some inspiring practices that already do this. The conclusions will be disseminated in a conclusion paper.

Target audience: teachers, youth workers, principals, pedagogues.

Some questions that will be discussed during the meeting include those below. Apart from these, we will discuss questions based on your registrations.

• How to convince youngsters of the importance of democratic values?
• How do practices dealing with the abovementioned aspects contribute to the necessary ‘resocialisation’ of youth?
• How can teachers and other youth professionals be best equipped to discuss these topics? Which skills do they need and where are these lacking at the moment?

How to register?

If you can provide concrete examples from daily practices, or if you experience challenges around this topic,please register here before 28 February. We will invite participants based on the information in the registration link.

Please note that we can only invite a limited number of participants to this meeting to ensure valuable exchange and interaction, so participation for this meeting is not guaranteed. 

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact Boy Broeders.