Abstract
Frances Howard’s perspective on arts as pedagogy in youth work offers refreshing insights into how young people and youth workers can engage in arts activities to create meaningful change. The author challenges our understanding of why the arts are useful in generating stories, voice and new knowledge.
Frances’ own lived experience of working within the sector, prior to entering academia, provides a rich context and relevance in her ability to generate understanding of the need for arts and youth work to be considered on a deep educational level. This level of understanding and experience underpins arguments on how arts spaces not only offer important opportunities for young people and youth work but how this can work vice versa.
The book offers critical understandings of arts as being vital to communities in developing ability to thrive in a more sustainable future. With a specific focus on youth settings, it asserts the importance of youth arts programmes. Drawing on six different case studies from across the globe (Finland, Scotland, Australia, Ireland and Germany) there is a good range of creative arts examples provided, giving the reader insight into how arts-based youth programmes are a meaningful process for change. As such, these comparisons argue that these spaces are needed for young people to come together to create and affirm culture, from their own lived experience, as a way of generating new understandings, knowledge and interpretations of their own lives.
Considering arts in youth work contexts the book highlights several approaches and frameworks in which to view them. Approaches, such as creative arts youth work (CAYW), arts as intervention (AI) and positive youth development (PYD), offer different ways on how arts programmes work and how they encourage young people into being involved. In highlighting these approaches there is attention to how arts are used and what counts as learning, creativity and youth work, as well as considering wider educational, social and economic aims.
Howard also brings focus to common culture, cultural citizenship and cultural democracy as being important themes that persist throughout the book. These themes provide frameworks for the future, and alternative conceptualizations, of youth arts programmes. This includes reference to ‘new diversity’ and symbolic creativity, and observation on comparisons and similarities to social pedagogy.
Although the author is mainly cultivating a positive dialogue that promotes the idea of arts programmes and young people’s involvement in arts activities, there is a recurring critical undertone in relation to governing bodies, policy and deficit labels. The text does not shy away from underlying issues around the expectations of some organizations or policies that see engaging in arts as being for different purposes. Howard challenges the rhetoric used within social and culture policy drivers as seeing young people as being problems to be fixed. There is a specific reference to the impact New Labour has had on youth policy and how youth arts programmes need to evidence their value for money. The message that arts will fix or transform young people associated with deficit labels is not what is being asked of in this book. Rather, it questions deficit discourses on a societal level raising issues of social justice about conditions of learning, cultural recognition and entitlement, which is exemplified through the case studies as examples of the longitudinal benefits and approaches to arts-based youth work.
This critical awareness is evident throughout the book and provides a narrative for the reader to consider the deeper purpose for arts programmes within youth work. The case studies bring a comparative national and international context, with data from participants, that create meaning and reason on why there is a need to hear about arts-based practices. In reference to the case studies the author shows that arts are a fundamental tool in working with communities and that these creative methodologies enlighten not only young people as producers but also the wider communities are afforded the opportunity to hear, see and listen to voices not often at the forefront of society. This book is a prime example of the need to bring these stories to our attention, but also to have a critical understanding of why it is imperative to the furthering of knowledge creation and widening discussion.
Although the book is focused on youth arts programmes and working with young people it also appeals to anyone who is interested in considering access for marginalized groups on a wider scale. It highlights social injustice through the lens of youth arts programmes, how certain groups of society are viewed and the impact this has on how power structures grant access to resources in different contexts. It provides and explores ways of theorizing youth arts pedagogies which is conducive to considering community work as an overarching practice, giving food for thought on how arts-based programmes are an important way of engaging in lifelong learning.
In conclusion, Frances Howard has written an authentic and authoritative text on arts-based programmes within the context of youth work which opens up a critical narrative on how these pedagogical approaches can be further developed to enhance young people’s creative skills. The book offers critical awareness of the importance of challenging deficit discourse labels and provides justification for considering arts as a legitimate learning process for creating stories and hearing young people’s voices. It is highly recommended that anyone teaching, learning or practicing within, and beyond, the field of arts or youth work, and those who have an interest in art-based pedagogies, read this book and be inspired to get involved!