Learning from the Streets

I wonder whether as youthworkers we have to take more seriously the realisation that our place is to not fit. To embrace the uncomfortability of not fitting and discover ways of being and helping learning flourishing in the non fitting spaces. 

It’s often said that a pioneer is someone who doesn’t fit. And that might be true. But being a pioneer is also a contextual reality. So even someone involved in youth ministry that wouldn’t even be thought of as ‘pioneering’ might be structurally a role that might not fit within a church, being employed but not clergy, being an adult working with young people but not a parent, being an advocate for young people. There’s a non fittingness or maybe more precisely a sense that even youth minister role in a church can be in need of inhabiting an in between space. A border space. 

And that’s before thinking about being a youth minister or worker in a school (where that dynamic between formal and informal education is most astute and the realisation of border navigation skills is required. 

In traditional youth ministry, there may not be the desire to ‘not fit’ because in a school the church is who is represented through the ministry. It’s about using the structured spaces of lessons or lunchtimes to deliver a message, the message of a different institution. 

If however there’s a seriousness to connect first with and respond to young people, a group in society whom we regard as not fitting, often oppressed and misunderstood, then our work and journey to do this causes and signifies a non fitting. If young people are primary clients (Sercombe) then we forego belonging in the structure. We navigate culture and occupy the borderlands. We leave aside legitimacy within structures and find a home in the edge. 

If to pioneer is to not fit. Then all youthwork that actively seeks the space and community of young people and inhabits this is pioneering.  Though even in institution we might not fit either. 

Cockburn uses the term border pedagogy to describe what it might mean to be a youthworker who educates within the margins, but also educates those in the structures about the reality of the borders and those who are in them and maintain being in them as they don’t fit. Giroux says something similar about crossing borders. 

Is knowing that not fitting is helpful? Maybe there’s an element that the more we fit the less space in the margins we are inhabiting, the more institutional in our positioning and outlook we have become. 

Kestwer brewin says that the church should be the margins. And not the core. The Third space in between was the space Jesus largely educated from. The fields, the crowds and the lake. It’s where St Francis and Mother Theresa found their home. Not fitting, but in the borders. Jesus didn’t fit. John the Baptist didn’t fit. 

To keep our view on the young people that gives youthwork or youth ministry it’s name. We need prompts to keep us in the borders, amongst the margins and at home in the space in between. Should a youth worker ever fit? There’ll be an element of not fitting in every context. If we’re listening to and providing spaces for young people and challenging the structures that keep them marginalised. Then the only place to fit in with and amongst them in their community. We start to navigate from them to the structures rather than the other way around.  

What if we feel like we don’t fit and we occupy the spaces in between? It’s kind of where we need to embrace being. Where we develop faith from, learning from and an understanding of the world and it’s cultures from. As youthworkers it’s the place we need to call home. Where young people are at home.