The question reaches you in different forms. Young people don’t come to you, and you don’t know whether the problem lies with them or with you. Your local cultural strategy mentions students without knowing where to start. Your teams waver between discouragement and alarmist talk about screens. Your culture department and your youth department work side by side without knowing each other. Your youth workers, your mediators or an artistic team are asking for methods to create with teenagers. These requests carry the same need: understanding young people better in order to work better with them.
We respond with the format that fits your situation: a morning or a full professional day bringing all your professions together around this question, a training course, an action-learning programme where participants build their own projects along the way, long-term support, a talk, a webinar. These moments benefit from being cross-sector: bringing culture, youth work, education, social work and care around the same table is often where things start to move, because each profession discovers what the others know.
The content starts from what 15-25 year olds actually do, as documented by sociology and by our own fieldwork, not from the received ideas that circulate about them. Youth only exists in the plural. Young people’s cultural practices have never been so intense; they have changed places and forms, and digital practices deserve to be looked at closely before being judged. This sociological ground meets psychology, which shows what a secure framework makes possible in a group, pedagogy, where people learn from lived experiences far more than from information, and cultural rights, which remind us that respecting a person’s culture is the condition for their contribution. Many young people, when asked about their tastes, answer “I like it, but it’s rubbish”: that is exactly where the work begins.
As in all our work, professionals experience the methods they will later be able to lead: questions answered by standing up or staying seated, timed exchanges in pairs, written contributions shared online through our sovereign digital tools. The methods experienced are named and explained at the end of the session, because they can be reused as they are, with young people, with an audience, with a team. And what has been produced remains: a collective bibliography, a wall of contributions, an editorialised summary, all accessible after the day, for those who were there and those who were not.
Benoît Labourdette has been working with young people for thirty years, in creative workshops, in job-integration services, in day hospitals, in child protection settings, and trains the professionals who work alongside them. This practice crosses artistic creation, pedagogy, psychology, cultural rights and digital culture, and it is this crossing that makes it possible to give professionals references and methods they can use the very next day, and through them, a real place to young people.
Among the projects carried out: the back-to-school morning on the cultural practices of 15-25 year olds, facilitated for the 220 staff members of Laval’s culture department [id to be confirmed?lang=en]; the action-learning programme that connected the culture and youth departments of Fontenay-sous-Bois; seven years of support for the cultural action department of Les Lilas, where teams learned by going through the experience; the cross-professional day on cultural professionals’ postures towards teenagers, at Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux; the national « Culture, youth and digital » training course of the Observatoire des politiques culturelles and its laboratory for new project formats; the training of Lot-et-Garonne cinema operators in welcoming young audiences.
To go further: the resources section Culture, youth and digital, the Youth domain, and the neighbouring pages Working in the field of care and child protection, Developing film and media education and Training professionals.
