Young people, education, employment and civic life during a pandemic: four provocations to social educators

Challenging times raise challenging questions. The pandemic and other global trends in recent years have highlighted profound questions that have salience to social and citizenship education. How do we as educators think about and respond to uncertainty amidst seemingly perpetual change? What role does hope play? Drawing from two papers published this year by the Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice (CYPEP) at Monash University - a discussion paper entitled “Life, disrupted: Young people, education and employment before and after COVID-19” (Walsh, Gleeson, et al., 2021) and the “2021 Australian Youth Barometer” (Walsh, Waite, et al., 2021) – the following discussion reflects on these challenging questions. The Youth Barometer includes a 2021 survey of over 500 young Australians and interviews with 30 more about their lives in relation to education, employment, health and wellbeing, money, housing, justice, safety and risk, and of central interest to this discussion, citizenship, belonging and inclusion.
This paper includes the voices of young people to examine rising uncertainty in education and employment, ways of civic participation, and hope during the pandemic. It presents four provocations to social educators (and political representatives): What is uncertainty? To what extent are social educators drawing on students’ relations and other aspects of their lives as a resource for developing citizenship? Are schools sites of civic and citizenship engagement or straight-jackets? And how can we educate beyond the spectres of uncertainty and hope? These provocations seek to be deliberately contentious in light of these challenging times.