Erasmus+ 24 May 2017
Erasmus Discussion - Exploring Professionalism in Youth Work
Question 2
What difference does it make for young
people to have professional youth workers working with them ?
For young people themselves it does not really matter for the youth worker to have a formal qualification, but it is important for the youth worker to have gained the competences pertaining to youth work. The level of experience is superior to formal professionalism; However, the profession needs formal recognition in order to gain credibility and be able to offer more support.
Poland: Degrees in community development and pedagogues/psychologists in schools.
Croatia: Public service is inefficient and young people are reluctant towards social workers, "defektologs" and pedagogues.
Austria: Youth work occurs outside school
Romania: School psychologists
Turkey: Pedagogues in schools
No proactive engagement
Peter talked about how many people were trained to be youthworkers. He mentioned it's difficult to measure the level of implementation on the baisis of qualitative and also quantitatve data. of course they are doing it and that's the way they measure the impact.
Madalina doesn't know the answer to the question. She mentioned in Romania they don't have youth centres. So mostly NGO's are dealing with the youths and it's hard to say more about impact. In Romania you can have any background and you just take a course of being youthworker but since the profession isn't practically recognized 'in the field" it doean't mean much. So the document doesn't matter so much.
To sum up: we don't have the data to measure it somehow. For Madalina and Galina and Dorota getting the certificate wouldn't change much.
Peter disagreed that professionalization is so 'useless' so he argued that recognition could help somehow.
So we finished on a few "IFS" maybe if the system would be like this that the being youthworker woudl be recognized then it could somehow help. Having it as a profession could help to open some doors but ...
Peter mentioned that some organization who are "too professionalized" get a bit sleepy. So the need of keeping some sort of dynamics, passion etc is strongly needed.
We added our comments about flexibity needed in every profession so there is this "human" aspect. The aspect of being very much into doing youthwork is difficult to create but without it .... it doesn't work or it works badly then. On the other hand the professionalization can be helpfull but till some extent.
Differences that it makes: minimum standard (even if they are not a guarantee); accountability; transparency, reflecting on how to put theory in practice/how to develop shareble theory from practice (praxis); comparing practices; sharing basic ethics rules; higher quality of youth work
Conditions: involving youth workers in the reflection about standards; providing supervision as support (not control); having a sufficient space of autonomy to develop practices and to experiment new practices to face new needs and challenges; being supported to translate/transfer general standards in the own specific context