Providing Education and Training for At Risk ... - Victoria University

e ‘returning to study’ will have moved far beyond these settings anyway, in terms of lifeexperience. We can unequivocally state that adult learning strategies must be at the heart ofprograms for alienated youth, and at the heart of those strategies is a respect for the experientialauthenticity of the learner.For this reason, it is important to agree with the plea from Anderson et al., for respect forclassroom diversity - ‘the conceptualising of disadvantage needs to accommodate diversityand difference and to acknowledge their link with systematic patterns of disadvantage andinequality’. They, and we, can offer no prescription for success. What is essential is a centralrecognition that ‘one shoe fits all’ is no longer (if it ever was) an adequate design feature foryoung people’s learning.Re-Thinking InstitutionsTraditional senior secondary schooling and traditional TAFE teaching, facing the newworld of workplace learning, would seem, on this evidence, to be in tension with it.Moreover, the new regard for young people as adult learners spills over into their nonschoollives. They are expected to take decisions framed by a host of sexual, gender, ethnic,religious, ability and family dimensions. Maturity - that is, a capacity for independent judgment- for that decision-making is, rightly or wrongly, imputed to young people from mid-teensonwards. The immediate concern, given this as a basis for policy and practices for alienatedyouth, is captured by Robyn Hartley, in an address to the Youth Affairs Council of Victoria in1995, when she stated:…the lines between dependence and independence in relation to young people are nolonger clearly drawn and there are many different patterns and combinations…Forexample, young people can live with their parents and be largely socially and financiallyindependent; they can live away from home and be financially supported by their parents.On the other hand, about one-quarter of the young people living ‘independently’ areliving in poverty. What, we may ask, in the meaning of independence in thesecircumstances? Isn’t it more productive to recognise the crucial role which interdependenceplays in all of our lives? (1996:4)Yet government policies, especially initiatives like the Commonwealth Youth Allowance, mayhave the effect of constructing distinctions between types of participants in, and recipients of,programs, which tend to fragment the experiences of young people in unhelpful ways. Thedifferential between over and under 18-year-olds, now emerging in the Youth Allowance, willinevitably have an impact on the sort of provision which schools and other program agencieswill try to develop. This is not least because there will be repercussions within families whensome members (under 18 yrs.) stand in more overtly supplicant relations to government welfare,compared to others (over 18 yrs.). Hartley draws our attention to the policy difficulties inherentin categorising participation, and she is right.Whilst this project is not centrally concerned with the categorisation of participants, it islegitimately mindful of the need for institutions and community agencies to design programsfor such participants which, first, respect the inter-dependent nature of young adults’experiences, and, second, recognise that these inter-dependencies are locally negotiated.25