Youth work pedagogy in higher education and the importance of not-knowing

Abstract

Within education, we often encounter the urgent need to recruit teachers who possess subject-specific knowledges and who can pedagogically teach the students the right things. In this article, I turn to youth work and the statement “I have a plan to not have plan” to put forward another view of pedagogical work—one that views knowledge also as non-knowledge and signifies an unmaking of normative defined notions of education, and by doing so creates situations of mutual learning, motion, and trust. Working with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence the discussion centers on the relation between knowledge and thinking. Although pedagogical approaches with predetermined activities that provide a clear return have for a long time been part of the language through which we discuss the content and practices of most educations, I argue that established knowledges can just as well work against learning, motion, and trust, while acting as teachers but not as knowledgeable experts may provoke thinking and enable standing side-by-side with students. And this is important. Not only in higher education but also in the society at large. Due to the experience of problems without visible solutions, young peoples’ trust in violence to influence society is increasing.

Introduction

“I have a plan to not have a plan,” he said quietly, the thoughtful and somewhat hesitant youth worker who sat further back. Scattered laughter was heard in the room at the same time as his words touched upon something within us. Something important and which we rarely manage to describe and discuss but which nevertheless is crucial when we think and design youth work, youth workers higher education, and politics. I think his name was Atle or maybe he was called something else. However, when he talked about the importance of not producing ready-made activities, not offering predefined solutions, and including others by showing uncertainty, it felt like wise words to elaborate further. Especially since there is no joint international agreement on what should be included in higher education for youth workers or how the teaching should be carried out. Some countries do not even have higher education for youth workers and are currently facing a major development effort both in terms of its content and how it should be taught.

Usually when courses are under development, we focus on subject-specific knowledges and sooner or later we come across the urgent need to recruit teachers who possess these subject-specific knowledges, and who pedagogically can convey these knowledges to students by asking the right questions and guiding them to the right answers (Gadamer 2004; Gasparatou 2017). This approach to educational activities, where capacity differences between teachers and students are clearly emphasized, aligns with the overall logic in today’s Western society where we are increasingly interested in results (cf. Cassidy 2007; Tesar et al., 2016). Goal-directed activities with definite ends where activities and situations are predetermined and yield clear returns, have long been part of the language through which we discuss the content and practices of education (Au, 2016; Barrett, 2009; Pickup, 2020). Within this approach, teachers are expected to support young people to become successful learners, and thus reach what they are not yet (Rooney, 2012). Similarly, teachers need to prove the value of their activities in relation to the learning institution that finances them. In terms of social policy, this can be related to neoliberalism and its emphasis on usefulness and utility (Taylor et al., 2018), and thus what the pedagogical activities of our educations provide the students with so that the students can live their lives elsewhere (Abebe et al., 2023). And this may be good, but with Atle, I want to suggest that youth work pedagogies and higher education for youth workers can paradoxically depend on the opposite: the ability not to produce ready-made activities aimed at creating capacity to handle pre-described situations, and to step away from the position of knowing. Taking a position of uncertainty and not-knowing can be seen as an inclusive process of mutual learning that opens up motions in various directions (Reinertsen, 2020). Perhaps this is also what Stengers (2018) implies when she argues that hesitations and indecision can be important prerequisites for being able to stand side by side with young people, and what Peters et al. (2021) suggest when they state that we need to invite the voices that are not yet part of our conversation. In the same vein, Tesar et al. (2016) put forward that we need to move beyond imagined shortcomings of young people and create futures with young people. And this is important. Not only in youth work and educational situations but also in society at large. In Sweden, for instance, more than every second young person fully or partly agrees with the statement that politicians cannot fully solve problems (The Generation Report). In the eyes of young people, problems seem to increase rapidly without any visible solutions, leading to a sense that things are not improving. Experiences like these undermine trust in the capacity of politicians and, by extension, democracy. This also reflects a global trend in which liberal democracies are declining. Simultaneously, the percentage of young people who can imagine resorting to violence to influence society is increasing (The Generation Report 2024).

Thus, this article is about an aspect of youth work pedagogy that signifies an unmaking of normatively defined notions of education, and by doing so creates situations of mutual learning, motion, and trust. But before I go there, I want to talk about our thinking. Even if thinking is one of the most fundamental things that we engage in, we do not seem to put that much effort into its critique. The basic argument in this article (to have a plan to not have a plan) happens in relation to a criticism of youth workers who predetermine activities and advocate for consensus solutions in situations where they do not know in advance what will happen. The image of thought that is referred to is essentially dogmatic and restricted by what we already know and what is generally believed. To elaborate a bit, this kind of thinking involves a process of recognition, and it is possessed by a subject (the youth worker). Given the pre-established thoughts and the conventional thinking, Atle is critical of the fact that we often try to maintain certainty in uncertain situations instead of working with the unknown together with young people.

Atle is a youth worker who has been working in one of Oslo’s most vulnerable areas for quite a few years now, and working with the unknown, he says, is not an easy task. According to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1994), it is not even a natural capacity that everyone possesses. Often, we need to be shocked in an encounter with others to start to think novel thoughts, that is, thoughts that we do not recognize beforehand. And for most people in the room, I guess, the comment from Atle (I have plan to not have a plan) had that shocking effect that provoked us to work with the unrecognizable as a process of becoming something new in collaboration with each other. We simply differed from ourselves at the same time as the divergences within ourselves aroused our thoughts about youth worker education and youth work pedagogy. Suddenly, youth work pedagogy was as much about unmaking as it was about collective creation. Perhaps, this is also what Deleuze (1994) suggests when he says that pedagogy is not something that is done by someone to others, but something that someone participates in, a mode of collective construction where teaching and learning become fused. I have research notes about this in a notebook. Research notes from observations in a workshop-like focus group meeting, in an Erasmus + project in Reykjavik, Iceland conducted by me and a colleague in 2022. Notes that I have read and re-read many times by now. Sometimes they give rise to novel thoughts, and sometimes they do not.

Practice of inquiry

Letting research notes give rise to novel thoughts is in tune with my encounter with Atle, how his words (I have a plan to not have a plan) released my energy and thoughts to move around and transform my understandings of youth work education and pedagogical work of youth workers. When Atle stated his plan to not have a plan for the first time, there were 20 youth workers from Norway and Iceland participating. The purpose of the workshop-like focus group was to collect the youth workers’ professional thoughts and experiences of youth work and make visible various principles that the youth workers put forward as important for the work they conduct in their youth clubs. The main goal of the Erasmus + project was to map these principles and collectively discuss what these principles imply when it comes to the development of common guidelines regarding higher educations for youth workers.

The images of youth work education and youth workers pedagogical work I captured in relation to Atle’s statement “I have a plan to not have a plan” were thus created in collaboration with others. And perhaps, these images could be seen as rather vague, not robust enough and even difficult to trust unless complemented with more empirical examples. Given that these images are not dependent on anything outside themselves, however, it would be an ontological divergence to bring in other more systematic empirical material from complementary case studies. In the workshop-like focus group meeting, we were not so interested in finding the truth about youth workers pedagogical work, nor were we interested in our different starting points. Rather, we were (and still are) interested in the remarkable and the important and thus what we arrive at. The milieu was full of connections and productions, within which a vast network of forces and processes continuously shaped and reshaped our ideas and thoughts about pedagogical youth work and its educations. In this work Gilles Deleuze philosophy of immanence was a pivotal principle for the ontological establishment of our unstable situations. Immanence means inherent and signifies very small units and properties that exist on scales below, above, and beyond specific activities of the focus group. Perhaps, Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 47) would call this workshop-like focus group meeting a plane where various processes sometimes encounter, take effect, and become extended. In that sense the workshop-like focus group meeting was a virtuality that included other virtualities as well as actualizations that made possible novel consistencies in both the focus group and our ideas of pedagogical youth work and its educations. It simply forced us to let go of our established thoughts, where our thinking consisted of processes of recognition and representations of what we already knew about youth work education and youth work pedagogy (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, p. 37-38), and enabled us to think thoughts that we had not been thinking before. For Deleuze this is a process of genuine thinking where our thoughts were no longer predetermined by common sense (Deleuze, 1994, p. xvi).

When it comes to research, this implies an open-ended approach to inquiry and does not include dominant methodological principles from which everything is derived and within which credible research can be performed. While I sat on the sofa and listened to Atle’s statement “I have a plan to not have a plan,” various youth workers started to talk to each other. In these dialogues, various opinions, beliefs, thoughts, examples, questions, and answers emerged, bumped into each other, and affected each other. Just as they were coordinating effects of each other, each opinion, belief, thought, example, question, and answer had coordinating effects on the others. In the process of being hit by each other’s opinions, beliefs, thoughts, examples, questions, and answers, Atle, I, and the other youth workers produced a zone of interdetermination. For Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 173), this is a zone where various affects are produced and populate the situation by uncontrollable becomings of novel thoughts. Here, affects are related to pre-personal intensities of bodily states of uncertainty about what happens. This in turn entails an important destabilization of how we perceive things. Thus, how we perceived youth work education and youth work pedagogy had nothing to do with perceptions (Deleuze 1990). In this inquiry, the objects of our perception were occasional results of the set of relations and sensations that emerged in the workshop-like focus group, and that lived on beyond our control and with which we at least sometimes become other.

Mutual recognition and co-created spaces

What Atle criticizes with his statement “I have a plan to not have a plan” is an epistemic view of knowledge. To theorize a bit, episteme is an Aristotelian concept (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Irwing, 1999), and within this approach the pedagogical work is established by youth workers and the organizational communities they belong to. The pedagogical work is based on a universal view of knowledge strongly linked to cultural-political ideas of what “new” activities that are needed at the youth club. In this way, the pedagogical work is downward and preserves the sociocultural order in the situation and from there supports a wider social and political order in society.

In relation to higher education the epistemic view of knowledge is strongly related to what we usually call formal curriculums. By following formal curriculums, teachers define what students should learn in prescribed courses. Beside formal curriculums, we sometimes also use notions like hidden curriculums, informal curriculums (see e.g., Winter and Cotton, 2012) and self-regulated curriculums (Nicol et al., 2018). Like formal curriculums, hidden curriculums refer to passive forms of learning but comprise implicit attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs that students learn unconsciously through lectures and peers. Informal and self-regulated curriculums, on the other hand, allude to more active forms of learning. While informal curriculums refer to personal and unstructured information transferred from teachers to students in voluntary, spontaneous and student initiated daily conversations and small talks that often occur before and after lessons (Hopkinson et al., 2008; Peeters et al., 2021), self-regulated curriculums are related to learning situations that are deliberately planned by the student and where the student set a concrete learning goal related to formal course requirements (Eraut 2000). What formal, hidden, informal, and self-regulated educational activities have in common is thus to serve the purpose of formal curriculum-based learning objectives (Decius et al., 2024).

Furthermore, Atle also criticizes a phronetic approach where youth workers obtain knowledge from young people and are loyal to that knowledge when they perform their pedagogical work. The application of Atle’s statement “I have a plan to not have a plan” to pedagogical work is far from an “anything goes” attitude to youth work activities. To elaborate, phronesis is another Aristotelian concept (Ord, 2016; Flyvbjerg, 2001; Irwing, 1999) implying that pedagogical work is upward and may resist overall organisational ideas and their quest for a specific social and political order. Unlike the epistemic model, the phronetic model includes no goal beyond the act itself. Within this approach the youth worker delivers activities but leaves it to others to act

For Atle, however, the statement “I have a plan to not have a plan” seems to imply a mode of critical/affective thinking and, at some point, genuine learning. One key element, he says, is to acknowledge complexity and a state where several knowledges exist at the same time without one being more important than the others. He exemplifies this by saying that he never knows in advance what the young people want to do when they come to the youth club, and if he decides something in advance, there is a great risk that they do not want to join the activity. Therefore, he just waits for them to show up and is prepared to let their ideas encounter his ideas. He says that this process almost always ends up with him doing things that he never has done before. Exploring, inventing, creating, guessing, and taking chances. This also applies to the young people. And while exploring new activities, he says they often need to bend established rules of the youth club because these rules seldom align with the activities they invent together. I guess he suggests us to criticize differences of people’s knowledges as differences in understanding their places in the world, and the things that have been accepted as established truths and repetitions in thought by these people and their surroundings become clear as dogmas. Hence, Atle suggests a pedagogy where youth workers should specifically not allow themselves to be convinced by previously agreed norms and not rely on consensus solutions. Rather, they need to continuously unmake everything that is taken for granted. Like Anderson-Nathe (2008), Atle describes that he uses his “ignorance” when he works side by side with young people in various situations. By showing ignorance he opens opportunities for young people to be carriers of their “own” knowledge. At the same time, the line between who is a carrier of knowledge and who is not become more unclear (cf. Ramey and Lawford, 2018). For me then, Atles statement “I have a plan to not have a plan” includes a re-examination of the relationship between youth workers and young people as binary opposites, Simultaneously, the relationship becomes movement-oriented. This in turn implies that Atle’s statement moves us beyond the phronetic approach. Instead of understanding youth work activities with both an epistemic and phronetic view of knowledge as a hierarchical system of relationships, the encounter with Atle makes me think that it is important to understand youth work pedagogy as a flow of relationships characterized by mutual recognition. The pedagogical model includes the full participation of youth workers as well as young people, and where all have full voices (cf. Peters et al., 2021). This in turn is an interesting change in the idea of what young people are and can be both in youth clubs, educations and in society at large. Not least because maintaining youth workers and young people as binary opposites risks to reinforces the position of young people as “the others” (Anderson-Nathe, 2008). In Atle’s perspective, I guess youth work pedagogy is about youth workers and young people doing things together and developing co-created “spaces” where the active participation of them both is promoted (c.f. Ramey and Lawford, 2018; Garfat and Fulcher, 2012).

Youth work pedagogy in and for motion

To have a plan to not have a plan puts the participants of youth work in a state of plural facts and it offers them many combinations of different knowledges. Important to note, though, is that in this perspective difference does not have a negative meaning. Rather, Atle talks about positive differences and the importance of not losing any knowledges. For Deleuze (1994) this is an approach to difference that implies encounters where various knowledges are allowed to exist at the same time, affect each other, and continuously produce new realities with/for each other. In these encounters, established thoughts are disrupted at the same time as affective forces crack and collapse into each other. This, in turn, opens up new understandings and unfinished interpretations outside previously known ways of performing pedagogical youth work activities, and where not-knowing continuously is a part of knowing.

However, this does not imply that Atle is opposed to bodies of fact or information that indicate that a belief or proposition is true or valid. He is not opposed to evidence. Rather, he talks about positive encounters between various evidences, and the importance of letting them bump into each other and put everyone’s knowledge in motion and at least sometimes create novel thoughts. And that gives me hope. Whether we engage in epistemic or phronetic approaches of youth work, they only secure their own truths in a positivistic manner. Thus, youth work can be performed in different ways, within which truths and knowledges are valued on their own ontological and epistemological terms. Although Altel’s statement “I have a plan to not have a plan” might be understood as having an intention to give away the power to define good youth work pedagogy, it seems to be the exact opposite. For me, Atle suggests that we need to slow down and wait for others and their knowledges, that we should allow transformative experiences to occur through affective forces and become pedagogical youth workers in motion.

To elaborate a little more, Atle says that at the youth club he usually collaborates with other youth workers and a group of young people to inquire what will happen next. As mentioned above, he does not know in advance what will happen. He does not approach young people or his colleagues with a pre-established idea in his mind nor with a set of skills he wants them to master. Rather, he works through interventions. When listening to Atle, one important thing about youth work pedagogy seems to be formation processes that enable various ideas, plans, and potential activity nodes to occur. Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call such activity nodes landing sites that trigger and initiate movement and sometimes individuate it into something possible. Landing sites are co-composed folds, or ecologies, that create differentiations and give dimensions to movements. Important to note, though, is that landing sites are not definite activity nodes that remain unchanged. Rather they continue to move in relation to what is experienced in time (Manning, 2013). As an example, Atle tells us about a situation when he got an idea of putting together a band which circulated, twisted, and turned in relation to several interconnected bodies (youth workers, young people, guitars, drums, and so on). To put together a band was not pregiven in Atle’s pedagogical work. It had no previously decided and direct outcomes. The idea of putting together a band was co-created between himself, young people and other youth workers through dialogues, discussions, experimental activities, video clips with other musicians, sounds from instruments and various pre-produced songs pouring out of the speakers. As an activity node and landing site, this had nothing to do with imitation. It was not that these interconnected bodies tried to imitate another more established pedagogical youth work activity. Pedagogical youth work in motion is not about imitation of what we already know. Rather it is about making our bodies enter into composition with other bodies (human or other materialities) in such a way that the affective forces given off from these bodies compose a novel activity. Here, putting together a band.

Pedagogical youth work provides us with more than we can think of

To me it seems like Atle talks about unmaking as much as he talks about collective creation. Opposed to habit and consensus that reduce our thoughts to what we already know and use to think, I guess he says that we must struggle against ready-made activities and plans, or what seems apparent to us. Similarly, May (2005) argues that we need to be vigilant when things seem given and appear as they are. Otherwise, we risk committing to conformism. This, in turn, radically alters the way pedagogical youth work is approached. Rather than seeing the youth club, its activities, and young people as already established elements that youth workers can plan for and provide activities to, pedagogical youth work here becomes a milieu, that is, the connective and including middle. In such a milieu, pedagogical youth work becomes what Patti Lather and Elisabeth St Pierre (2013) describe as the “problematic field of entanglement” where youth workers, at the same time as they carry out pedagogical youth work, confront the ways in which pedagogical work is often performed as taking things for granted, having knowledges in advance, and deciding how to make young people develop specific skills. In fact, the more Atle talked about having a plan to not have a plan, the harder it became to distinguish the ongoing pedagogical youth work he described from the process of acting it out. It is a pedagogical youth work in/for movement. For Atle, pedagogical youth work is thus a way of engaging and expressing activities such as putting together a band. Pedagogical youth work is not the tool or method to define the band. Rather, pedagogical youth work is processual and emergent, and it constantly changes in/with the situation. In this view, human actors do not seem to be detached from other materialities in the situation. Youth workers, young people, music instruments, various sounds, furniture, the smell of coffee, and so on form the processes of activation at the youth club.

Thereby, Atle’s idea of having a plan to not have a plan seems to activate new relational fields and new modes of experiencing and knowing. If we want to engage in this pedagogical approach of youth work and loosen our ties to more traditional pedagogical work (knowing in advance what to do when), we need to free ourselves from ready-made formal curriculums and methods and consider other ways of doing activities. Other ways that are immanent to their own activity design. Thinking with Atle’s idea of having a plan to not have a plan, I guess we must disrupt ourselves from the idea that youth work pedagogies (or youth workers) exist prior to the act of youth work and rather visualize youth work pedagogies in the milieu. I also suggest that we cannot take the human subject as a starting point. In accordance, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) argue that milieus are vibrant and chaotic spaces of co-composed and re-composed activities. Various bodies (human and other materialities) are swept up in an event that is not bound to a specific territory. In relation to more traditional educational milieus, Bennet calls this “mobile configurations” and suggests that bodies (students, teachers, smells, books, computers, papers, classrooms, corridors, and so on) are all “living things” that carry out actions that code and re-code the bodies involved in the situation. In tune with Atle’s statement “I have a plan to not have a plan,” pedagogical work becomes an event of differences that cannot be articulated in advance or in concrete and definite form. Rather it is an affective field where young people, youth workers, furniture, music instruments, sounds, smells, pool balls, video games and so on are seen as events, and thus nodes of the larger youth work topology. They simply exist as youth work creations, and thus a process that Massumi (2013) suggests enfolds the form of what will become.

Sense in the making

Atle says that having a plan to not have a plan is not easy since it requires us to break away from common sense and the image of thought it produces. In more traditional pedagogical work, however, common sense is often a general frame in which much education takes place (Snir, 2018). It is assumed that pedagogical communities elicit or cultivate common sense and thereby contribute to the production of shared meanings and values which, in turn, make educations self-evident for most of their participants (Gadamer, 2004; Gasparatou, 2017). Yet, Atle and the statement of having a plan to not have a plan provides us with another perspective of pedagogical work. A perspective that views pedagogical work as a radical challenge to common sense and revolves around making sense.

As mentioned earlier, Atle takes the side of ignorance, that is, a person that do not know things in advance, a person who works without presuppositions. As Atle describes it, his overall intention is to bridge the gaps between young people and the surrounding society by rejecting established knowledges accessible only to the latter. Providing youth work for common sense and thus making use of ready-made plans, he continues, is highly problematic because we tend to uncritically accept certain ideas and knowledges as true while assuming that we train young people for critical thinking, but instead only justify a way of thinking established by these very assumptions. What is perceivable and thinkable, right and wrong, valuable and worthless is determined beforehand. Simultaneously, we treat young people as they have abilities to achieve the right knowledges and perform the right activities, if only they think, act, and do things properly.

To me it seems like common sense risks both to provide youth work with a frame in which pedagogical work can take place and become an inherent pedagogical dimension that produces and shapes subjects. And I guess Atle puts forward that in every act of recognition and communication common sense educates its participants and thus establishes reasonable experiences and actions that tie youth workers and young people as well as their thoughts to a predetermined order of youth work, and in extension society. For Deleuze (1994), however, common sense is not exclusively bad but rather a necessity to communicate and move along in everyday life (Williams, 2008). The problem is how common sense tends to take over our thoughts and actions and provides them with an established pattern. By having a plan to not have a plan, Atle advocates a youth work for genuine thinking and thus another understanding of sense than common sense and non-sense. Namely making sense. In a similar way, Deleuze (1990) suggests that sense is an effect of interactions between language and things in a situation. Sense is always in the making, and it emerges continuously in the encounter between what is said and what is happening as well as what is not said and what is not happening. Sense is a pure event that makes truths possible at the same time as it becomes true. Truth is therefore created in sense, or as Deleuze (1994) puts it: “Sense is the genesis or the production of the truth, and truth is only the empirical result of sense.”

Among Deleuzian scholars, this is not new (see e.g., Roy, 2005; Semetsky, 2007) and several scholars in the educational field have pointed out that sense is not the same thing as meaning (see e.g., Semetsky, 2013; Williams, 2008). If there is no change and our language and our reality remain the same, there is no sense. Often, words and things pass each other without any sensible effect because they do not denote anything different from themselves. They simply denote what they express and express what they denote and for Deleuze (1990) such utterances are commonsensical, but they make very little sense. For youth work pedagogy to make sense, I guess Atle suggests that it needs to interrupt the obvious chain of common sense and put our thinking in constant movement. This because sense is not common at youth clubs and youth workers rarely know in advance exactly what will happen in the encounters with young people.

Making sense and mutual learning

To understand how making sense is related to the youth work pedagogy described by Atle and thus higher education for youth workers, I guess we need to return to the relation between our thinking and common sense. Since our thinking most often conforms to what we already know, novel thinking requires a disruption of those established knowledges and thus an interference in how we generally relate things to each other. We simply need some disharmony to stop following common sense and become open for new experiences and thinking. To provoke our thinking, Deleuze (1994) suggests that we need positive unities of opposites, and one major challenge related to this is to avoid binary distinctions between those who are considered knowledgeable and those who are not (cf. Abebe et al., 2023). To have a plan to not have a plan is thus an important pedagogical act to make sense in youth work because it enables young peoples’ knowledges and ideas to violently impose themselves on the youth workers’ senses and wake them from a state of habitual thinking and calmness, and vice versa. For the pedagogy of youth work, I guess these are important encounters where both youth workers and young people are unable to react in ordinary ways and thus starts to operate in a more freethinking and unconventional manner independent of previously agreements about what is right and wrong, good and bad, intelligent and unintelligent. Having a plan to not have a plan thus seems to open up for extensions of our thinking. Extensions that we do not recognize but sense, which passes through our inherent ability to shape new ideas, images, and concepts into thoughts.

Unlike epistemic and phronetic pedagogies of youth work, which both include common sense agreements, making sense is an independent activity of the participants involved. An activity that follows from unique interpretations much more than established knowledges in the situation. Making sense is thus not only to differentiate in thought but also to become different in the process. To change in/with the process and allow something new to be brought into existence. Such pedagogical acts are not so much about using or processing what we already know, that is, the tings, concepts, and actions we are used to and feel comfortable with but rather creativity and the willingness to come up with new suggestions and ideas. In the activity of making sense, youth workers’ ideas must emerge in encounters with young people. Ideas can never be products of established knowledges, and if they are results of our awareness of facts and familiarity with individuals and various situations, we are working within the activities of common sense. Rather they need to generate novel thinking.

With “having a plan to not have a plan” I guess Atle simply emphasizes the importance of revealing something hitherto unknown by allowing our thinking to be awakened by each other’s ideas. This, in turn, is perhaps what Deleuze (1994) calls learning. To elaborate a bit Deleuze (1994) makes a distinction between learning and knowledge. While learning is something that happens when we are confronted with a problem (idea), knowledge is the calm ownership of a set of principles or rules enabling solutions to a problem. Atle exemplifies this by describing a situation where some are trying to learn to play the guitar. In this situation, it is not that interesting how the guitar is constructed, what strings it has, or how guitar notes work. It is all about starting to play. And listen. To let our senses confront the tones, respond to them, and act in accordance with their sound. Sometimes, I guess, this is called playing by ear. For Deleuze (1994) this activity is clearly thinking and thus about making sense. The activity of learning to play by ear is therefore an example of an activity of making sense and in which we all seem to renew ourselves in each other.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 88) activities/processes of making sense could also be understood as assemblages where various elements encounter each other and creates flows that are broken by at least some of the other elements. Atle exemplified this by telling us about a situation when he was asking a young girl to try to play the guitar she was holding in her hands, but when the moves of the girl did not resemble that of Atle’s suggestion. Even if the girl had no intention to be troublesome, he said, she started to drum with her hands on the guitar. Her hands moved with the music, which was still pouring out of the speakers, and to that sign Atle responded by starting to strum a few chords on another guitar. For Deleuze (1994, p. 27) these encounters between signs and responses are precisely those spaces where novel thinking and thus learning takes place. Neither the young girl’s nor Atle’s responses echoed that of a sign, but when Atle started to listen to the girl’s drumming and then started to play the guitar with the rhythm of her drumming he also brought to life an idea of trust that seemed to move the young girl from state of uncertainty to a state of certainty and made her rely on herself, the guitar-drum, and Atle.

Youth work pedagogy in higher education and the emergence of trust

Perhaps this moment when the girl started to drum on the guitar can be experienced as a loss of the power of definition. A loss of being the one who knows that the guitar is not a drum, and thus the ability to maintain the knowledge how to use a guitar. Simultaneously, encounters like these seem to be crucial for the emergence of trust (Andersson et al., 2021). Further, the young girl’s trust does not seem to be anchored in an idea of what is right and wrong, but in the unfolding process of the present intertwined with the indeterminable potential of Atles pedagogical work, the guitar-drum, and herself. This is also why I suggest that trust in situations of pedagogical work may not primarily be thought of in moralistic, systematic, and logical terms. When she started to use the guitar as a drum, I guess the young girl did not make moral assessments whether Atle, the guitar, and the music was trustworthy or not. Nor did she take a chance to reach a specific outcome. There was simply no calculation of future risks other than not look like an idiot in front of her friends, and hence no other transgression of the bounds of the present. Rather the young girl’s trust was created in a situation of experience. Or to put it otherwise, the pedagogical work to learn to play a guitar-drum becomes an event co-composed in the situation. Integral to an event is how we experience ourselves in co-composition with others. It is simply experiences in the making. Along this line of thinking, experience is not so much about reflection and the process of deciding or planning something in relation to the past. Working with youth work pedagogy as an event is a way of participating at the youth club, a way that makes the creation of differences possible and thus the creation of the new. Conscious and unconscious creations. Perhaps this is also what Baldini et al. (2024) suggest when they argue for the need to slow down and move beyond taken for granted norms of what it means to listen to others and what Abebe et al. (2023) imply while they encourage us to avoid binary distinctions. Thinking with Atle, youth workers and young people are placed in a mutual learning process, that is an iterative process without mutual order and where they unlearn and reconfigure our so often dominant framing of knowledge production. While the young girl learned how to play a guitar-drum, Atle learned that patience and waiting is important ingredients for the young girl to feel safe at the youth club. For Deleuze (1994, p. 171), these are all processes of becoming. Born within the present and placed between the past and the future. To elaborate, becoming is about creation of the new rather than attaining a form of imitation, identification, or representation. It is to find a situation, or a zone, where bodies can come together with contrasting effects and where they can achieve a state of immanence and open to new trajectories.

To speculate a bit further, this implies that curriculums in higher educations for youth workers cannot be seen as continuous policy documents defined by pre-established ideas of what youth work is. Rather, curriculums in higher educations for youth workers seem to be something in the making and of which we do not know what is yet to come. To be more precise, they seem to need to embrace internal differences (dissimilarities, divergences and diversifications for instance between teachers’ and students’ knowledges). These curriculums are, without doubt, chaotic in the sense that their evolving and violent orders are always created in and by situations of disorder. I guess Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would relate this image of curriculum to the notion of chaosmos, and where higher educations for youth workers go beyond the stability of formal curriculums. Instead of focusing so much on the “what,” I guess Atle suggests that we should pay more attention to the “how” and “why.” There is no established continuity in which the activities of youth worker educations can be performed in the same harmonic way. And, this is not to say that higher educations for youth workers concerns only unstable states of teaching-learning practices. Rather, higher educations for youth workers seem to need to include two simultaneously ongoing modes of teaching-learning practices, stable and instable. And this is not to move from the neoliberal inspired order of formal curriculums to complete chaos. It is not one or the other but both, order and chaos simultaneously. Thinking with this collective-creation-curriculum higher education for youth workers become constant infolding processes, and their content depend on the random outside we cannot fully control (students and teachers). I guess, this is also what Rooney (2012) implies when she suggests that we need to contest the linear and developmental application of the notion of becoming in today’s educational settings and move towards a non-linear approach of becoming. It is about inviting knowledges that are at variance with those commonly held in our practices and let our knowledges encounter around issues of common concern. This, in turn implies demanding environments where both teachers and students are considered to be experts of their own situations. Simultaneously, we (teachers) need to be humble and not act in a way that may create contrasts in relation to students, but that enable relationships. And just as Stengers (2018) suggests, we cannot present ourselves as we hold various attributes that students do not have. We also need to be sincere in our concerns and interests and recognize the concerns and interests of students.

Atle put forward that at the youth club, the young peoples’ bodily creations and expansions emerge through connections with others and not due to their awareness of their shortcomings. The young girl did not learn to play a guitar-drum because she knew that she could not play, or that she needed to be a member of a band. Rather learning seems to be a creative process that concerns the part of our minds of which we are not fully aware, and thus of a different nature to knowledge. The process where the young girl became someone who can play a guitar-drum was probably shaped by affects that were not entirely rational or which she was not fully aware of, and as such neither her trust nor her learning had final objects. By surrendering to the rhythm of occasions, both Atle and the girl attained a state where their bodies were immanent and open to new affective flows, relations, and pathways, and to me it seems like they were equipped with what Deleuze (1994, p. 173) calls “the necessary modesty to managing to not know what everybody knows” (that the guitar is not a drum). And, this makes me think that the youth work pedagogy of not-knowing which puts our bodies in motion and engages us in mutual learning for becoming rather than situations where one is teaching the other and then expects that he or she have learnt the right things; that may very well be an important practice that, if included in higher education for youth workers, will ultimately promote the reconceptualization of societal improvements, trust in the capacity of politicians and social democracy?