Helping professionals design new types of projects adapted to the needs of young people

In the face of young people’s indifference toward institutional culture, I propose exploring an innovative training framework aimed at helping professionals rethink their cultural approaches. This involves deconstructing preconceived notions and integrating digital practices to better address the actual needs of contemporary youth.

The Challenges of Rethinking Cultural Projects for Youth

Cultural offerings are sometimes harshly questioned by the “young” audience. This critique manifests itself through indifference toward the directives of cultural institutions, or even a disinterest in cultural spaces. Over the past 20 years, digital technology has drastically reshaped young people’s relationship—and everyone’s—with time and private space. The very definition of culture and how it is accessed has transformed.

How can we rethink cultural projects and policies to align with the real needs of today’s youth? This is the focus of the professional training programs I lead, drawing from my multidisciplinary perspective as an artist, consultant, field worker with young audiences, and researcher influenced by psychoanalysis, sociology, and ethnology.

What do I focus on in these training sessions? What are the obstacles (preconceptions, opinions, blockages)? What levers do I employ to overcome them (particularly in the realm of digital culture)? What lessons emerge from these experiences? And what can we extrapolate to inform youth cultural policies?

Thought and the Hand

The research of prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan reveals that human thought developed through the use of the hand. It is because we have hands that we have vocal organs. Without hands, we would need a snout, beak, or hard lips to feed ourselves, which would prevent us from articulating words and, consequently, forming thoughts through language (via the neural connections this fosters). Thought is thus intrinsically linked to the hands. Believing that thought is independent and superior to gesture is, at its core, naive and disconnected from reality. Yet, this assumption significantly impacts the design of education, cultural action, and their methodologies.

Toward an Anthropology of Action and Knowledge

To work within the dialectic between thought and action, I always break down training sessions, whether short or long, into three phases that interact rather than follow one another. This structure is underpinned by the idea of “thinking action” or “thinking differently in action”—essentially, no longer separating thought from action. I formalize these three phases as follows:

• Knowledge: Deepen sociological, technological, artistic, cultural, and conceptual knowledge through readings and exchanges: inform yourself.
• Methods: Discover and experiment with unconventional cultural and pedagogical action methods that break away from tired, ineffective paths for youth, through novel, unlikely, and often destabilizing partnerships: move beyond the familiar.
• Projects: Redesign projects and their evaluation criteria, listen to other professionals’ experiences to enrich one another through peer learning, and envision more attentive and informed support for artists, facilitators, and partners: take risks, and embrace trial and error.

Deconstructing Systems of Domination

The goal of professional training is to guide participants in discovering new perspectives and acquiring new skills. The conventional top-down method—such as lecturing linearly with a PowerPoint—reflects the belief (debunked by pedagogical research for over a century) that simply telling someone something equates to them acquiring knowledge.

Moreover, this approach reinforces a power dynamic of the “knower” over the “learners,” symbolically constructing a hierarchy between “dominant” and “dominated.” Knowledge is thus fixed, with learners left to passively receive this “wisdom.” They are assigned the role of being “trained,” in the disciplinary sense. Rebellion or disinterest toward such a system of domination seems to me the healthiest and most democratic reaction.

Overcoming Condescension Toward Youth

A similar logic often underlies cultural offerings for youth: “good things” chosen by the dominant to acculturate supposedly “uncultured” young people. But what is their place as individuals with their own cultural experiences? And how can they find it if they are not actively listened to? Are cultural rights respected in approaches centered on the “quality” of offerings? And by what criteria is this “quality” judged?

My objective in these trainings is to dismantle preconceived notions (about youth, digital culture, and culture itself), enabling participants to think and act differently. I do not seek to impose my viewpoint or incite debates over opinions.

The Process of Learning

We learn through our experiences and the situations we encounter. We make personal journeys and learn on our own, attaching knowledge to our lived emotions. To appropriate and establish knowledge is to construct it through discoveries, to arrive at unexpected places, to contribute and share our research with others, and to fully occupy our place in the process. Anthropologist Tim Ingold synthesizes this well in his book “Anthropology as Education” (2017).

This is why these trainings are primarily experiences I propose to participants, and they will each learn what they need to learn. And I, too, will learn from the situation; I will shift my perspective.

I draw on the pedagogical method of Célestin Freinet, who gave his students a tool and a purpose (e.g., a printing press to create a newspaper). Participants autonomously use the tool to serve a concrete project. Freinet’s students created a newspaper that was distributed in the village. The Freinet method encompasses all necessary learning: writing and its ramifications, relationships for interviews, layout, argumentation, logic, technical mastery, communication, iconography, etc. Each learns, at their own pace, what they need to, edition by edition. For my part, I’ve developed a digital collaborative writing tool, which serves as the training’s purpose, record, and memory.

Digital Spaces as New Arenas for Cultural Democracy

A common assumption in the cultural field is that the ideal cultural project is embodied group presence. It’s about filling theaters, museums, cultural centers, or cinemas to the brim. This approach focuses on locations rather than individuals. For example, is a film better watched in a cinema than at home? It is watched differently, of course, but asserting a hierarchy disrespects people’s usage and cultural rights; this professional stance disregards cultural rights (NOTRe law, 2015).

During 2020-2022, marked in France by lockdowns and restrictions imposed without democratic debate, digital usage expanded, revealing cultural processes already at work. Paradoxically, digital spaces continued to enable democratic exchanges and cultural access while physical spaces were denied in multiple ways. This challenges the idea that in-person encounters inherently foster richer democratic ties and openness to others than those mediated by digital networks.

During these difficult times, digital technology became a profound connector. Everyone had to invent new modes of interaction. Human creativity was exemplary. Culture through digital means—or rather cultures, in terms of dissemination and creation—became the central axis around which the human community reknit itself. Many cultural spaces devised innovative ideas to fulfill their missions by reinventing digital mediation strategies. However, industrial cultural platforms took control of cultural practices, as they had long believed in the value, if only commercial, of such “cultural consumption and contribution.”

Online cultural exchanges and experiences are highly specific, rich in singular and constructive experiences that can transform lives, careers, personal and professional trajectories, and social roles... Everyone experiences this firsthand; digital technology is central to our existence. How can we learn to account for it in cultural projects? How can we move beyond the triviality of circulating information on social networks (mere communication) to fully embrace digital potential? And how can we continue to cultivate it, as post-Covid, we seem to have forgotten what we learned about digital mediation during the pandemic.

The Deliberate Choice of Videoconferencing

Thus, in designing the “Culture, Youth, and Digital” training for the Observatoire des Politiques Culturelles, we chose a fully videoconference-based format (three days spaced a week apart) to explore, through lived experience, the potential of digital technology in building connections, cooperation, democracy, and mutual enrichment.

I designed the interaction framework based on the premise that “distance” is not a poor substitute for “in-person.” Thus, the subject we aim to discuss—how to incorporate digital technology—is mirrored in the pedagogical framework: rather than speaking about it from external preconceptions, let’s first live the experience and learn from it. I, too, have something to learn from it, and this is the healthy stance to adopt in developing cultural projects, I believe.

One of my starting points was that, in a remote setting, informal exchange spaces between participants (coffee breaks, evenings...) would be missing, where mutual enrichment also occurs. Bonds form, projects can emerge thanks to this “extra” space. How, in a remote setting, can we create spaces for democratic connections and free, mutual contributions? This consideration guided the pedagogical design of the training, and it ultimately led to a result far beyond what I had imagined, as you will now discover.

The Pedagogical Framework in Videoconferencing

We chose to divide each day into six one-hour blocks, with 15-minute breaks between them and a lunch break. I strive to adhere to this structure (rhythm, timing, etc.) to ensure participant comfort. Each hour has a specific topic, energy, and logic. This precise program is shared with participants in advance, so they don’t perceive it as a “tunnel day” but as distinct points to mentally prepare for (even unconsciously).

This experience also informs the question of screen time: what matters, especially for young people, is not the time spent in front of screens, but what they do there! From the outside, we can’t guess this. If we genuinely care, we’ll see things completely differently. And we’ll move beyond judgmental stances toward young people’s practices. This isn’t demagoguery; it’s genuine connection, meaning an interest in the other.

Here’s how I structured each hour:

1. I begin with a very short introduction, no more than five minutes, on the session’s objectives.
2. Then participants are invited to share their expectations orally. I note them on-screen in a mind map, giving value to each person’s input.
3. Next, I develop my perspective and references on the topic for a good 15 minutes (with many illustrations, books I film live with a second camera while handling them, which adds embodiment, and I also take handwritten notes in front of this camera).
4. There may then be a brief oral exchange (5 minutes), which I note in a mind map.
5. Most importantly, 15 minutes are dedicated to writing by each participant in an online collaborative writing space, based on my prompts for the following topics:
   • What I’ve retained and find important.
   • My remarks and disagreements.
   • My ideas from this and the references I’d like to add.
6. Finally, five minutes are spent reading everyone’s contributions.

The moment of re-reading is striking: we learn a lot, put our thoughts in perspective with others’, and are surprised by the incredible richness of the contributions. My role as facilitator is to provide direction, with concrete paths and a fairly sharp perspective, and from there, the richness of each person’s viewpoints and contributions unfolds, fully assumed in their singularity.

At the outset, I clearly state that everyone has valuable skills and contributions to share. My role as training facilitator is not that I know more about the topic than the participants, but that I propose work paths within which I invite each person to contribute from their perspective. This collaborative space aims to become a resource for each participant post-training. It thus holds the same importance as Freinet’s newspaper. This also references the method developed by Jacques Rancière in “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” (1985).

Being together in shared time creates powerful synergy. The writing moment is dense and intense. The group effect—writing individually and collectively—means we end up writing deeper and more significant things than we’d have thought possible alone.

As the facilitator of these trainings, my job is to “let go,” to give as much space as possible to the participants and their contributions. To fully trust them. Easier said than done. I’ve also shifted: where I initially saw collective writing moments as mainly “formalizing the informal,” they’ve produced knowledge and collective intelligence on a scale I hadn’t imagined.

From this, I now incorporate moments of online contributions in in-person trainings, propelling the content to levels I hadn’t known before. Additionally, I structure my days with much more rhythm.

The Framework Is Listening

What is a framework? A framework is what enables, what allows self-expression—meaning a contribution that enriches others. To express oneself, one must feel secure, unafraid of judgment, as fear of judgment leads to self-protection, which often means not expressing one’s thoughts. What enriches the collective is the expression of each person’s uniqueness. But expressing oneself carries a social risk: one may be mocked, judged, stigmatized, or even excluded from the social body.

Thus, trust is what must be built to establish a framework. But how? The “teacher” must begin by listening to the “students.” They will feel recognized as individuals. This weaves bonds, fostering trust and the willingness to take the risk of expression. These bonds can be imagined as a weaving, a canvas, which constitutes the support on which one can paint. The framework must authorize possibilities through openings, rather than block them with prohibitions.

Listening means working on oneself to let go of criteria, to open up to what the other offers, which can be destabilizing. This is how we are enriched—by being unsettled. Neuroscience shows this: we must resist our reflexive thinking to learn (cognitive resistance, cf. Olivier Houdé, “Apprendre à résister,” 2014). I applied this method in the “Culture, Youth, and Digital” training and later explained it to participants: I, too, had to let go of my criteria to fully give them their place as contributors.

This process, of course, is the same with youth: building a framework of trust to give them their full place, enabling the project to become much deeper than what could have been conceived without their involvement.

Awarenesses and Political Perspectives

Recent sociological studies (“Pour une politique de la jeunesse,” Camille Peugny, 2022) show that the idea of “youth” as a category in itself, with shared interests and practices, is a misconception. What differentiates individuals is not so much age as socio-cultural category. Thus, “youth” must be approached flexibly and certainly doesn’t constitute a relevant category for addressing cultural projects. It is rather individuals and their journeys that must be considered, as no one remains young forever.

In the feedback we received from participants during and after this training, there was a strong awareness—stemming from lived experiences, both professional and personal—of the general stance adults take toward youth, which is normative, lacking in listening, and entirely misguided. This stance fosters stigma, exclusion, and prevents mutual enrichment. Collectively, participants analyzed that what blocks youth projects are the postures and preconceptions of professionals, who struggle to move beyond reassuring and condescending dogmas about the “failings of youth” and the “dangers of digital.”

Some participants engaged in intense self-criticism, both of the projects they currently lead and of their own postures. They became aware of the depth and breadth of the work required, starting with themselves, as well as the power of the obstacles, both regarding youth and digital. There was also an awareness of the importance of every small movement, as precious as a planted seed.

I suggest and encourage the formation of informal networks for sharing practices and perspectives around youth projects. Even two people, colleagues or partners, who set a one-hour meeting every three months to dialogue, without productivity pressures, to help each other gain perspective, is a significant step.

Changing Methods to Change Results

We’ve highlighted that the work begins with changes in how partners (institutional, cultural, social, artistic, pedagogical) relate to one another. And if the work of self-questioning continues, it will lead to shifts in work methods and cooperation, as well as hierarchical structures within organizations.

Indeed, if we don’t work differently, if the roles of individuals don’t shift, we won’t be able to change anything regarding youth. This interplay between methods and results is what we must be aware of. We must also recognize the difficulty in shifting social structures, the viewpoints of colleagues, technicians, artists, elected officials... And thus be modest and conscious that what we do is very limited, and that the path to truly meaningful youth projects is long, deep, and above all, deeply internal.

Example of the digital sharing space for the “Culture, youth and digital” training course in 2023