Projects

Pathways to Preferred Futures for Young Australians

Source: University of Melbourne

One of the most complex and least understood dimensions of the challenges facing Australia is how people affect, and are affected by, the processes of economic, social, environmental and cultural change. This is about individual lives and understandings, and it is also important to how Australia shapes its future. The interactions between individual lives and shared futures are the subject of a second joint project between Australia 21 Ltd, a not for profit public-interest research company, and the Australian Youth Research Centre. AYRC staff have been working closely with the Project Leader, Richard Eckersley, on both projects.

The first project under the program, Pathways to success and wellbeing for Australia’s young people, aimed to identify ways to help young people to optimise their wellbeing and to realise their full potential against a background of often adverse trends in their physical and mental health and wellbeing. The final report of this project (Eckersley, Wierenga & Wyn, 2006) was published in March 2006 and is available from the Australia 21 website (www.australia21.org.au). Hard copies are available from the AYRC. Papers drawing on the report have been published in the Medical Journal of Australia and Youth Studies Australia.

In 2006 the second project within the program, Pathways to the preferred futures of young Australians, took up themes discussed in the first project: the importance of cultural ‘intangibles’ to wellbeing (especially how young people see the future), and the role of narrative in their lives. Funding for this project came from the Vice Chancellor at The University of Melbourne.

The project has included several elements: a literature survey; the workshop using ‘role-based enquiry’, a drama technique that allowed young people to create, show, narrate and interpret their views of the future; a ‘network’ of informed commentators (from futures studies, youth studies, education, psychology, history and drama) who played an important but contained role in witnessing and engaging with the youth participants; and surveys of attitudes to trends in quality of life, the future of Australia and the world, and to the impacts of science and technology. Thus the project married the sciences with the arts, and quantitative with qualitative approaches.

Helen Cahill led a one-day youth consultation forum for the project. This took the form of a drama-based enquiry in which schools and tertiary students participated with an interdisciplinary team of academics to construct and discuss images of their anticipated, feared and preferred futures. The creative and interactive mode of enquiry prompted a rich dialogue and the data generated is discussed in a forthcoming report. The multi-modal drama-based methodology provided a useful mechanism for generating inter-generational communication and for assisting the young people to articulate their views.

Young people’s reflections indicate that they particularly value the opportunity to engage seriously with older people about ethical, social, political and environmental issues. They would like to be heard by older people, but they also want to hear what older people think. This raises a critical question: how does society generally provide the spaces within which young and older people can engage in meaningful dialogue?

The project also has significant messages for those involved in the development and implementation of youth policy, across all jurisdictions, for the private sector and for research. In particular, the young people revealed that they:

• Have a strong sense of personal responsibility for building positive futures, for themselves and their society. They have concerns about both personal issues (for example, getting a good job or doing well in their studies) and about community and global issues (for example, poverty, the environment and terrorism), but feel relatively helpless to address the ‘big picture’ issues and disempowered beyond individual responses.
• Enjoy sharing and creating stories from their own experience and hearing those passed on through family and community. Stories about overcoming adversity and about hope for the future are an important resource on which they draw in solving their own problems and in understanding how to take action.
• Find that a sense of agency, commitment and hope is generated when they engage in dialogue across the boundaries of age groupings, location and expertise.

A monograph of this is available.

Contact:  Ani Wierenga, Johanna Wyn, Helen Cahill

Email: wierenga@unimelb.edu.au, h.cahill@unimelb.edu.au, j.wyn@unimelb.edu.au