Youth work that works The learning society as a challenge to the public role of youth work.

In the current youth work practice and research, the societal role of youth work is approached in an instrumental way. Youth work is seen as a tool that enables youngsters to gain certain competences which prepare them for participation in public life, strengthen their societal position and help to fight social ‘ills’. What is missing is an educational approach of youth work. This approach would allow for an educational understanding of the societal role of youth work. Therefore, the proposed research first intends to investigate youth work practices as educational practices, that is, to come to an articulation of their distinctive pedagogical forms (as different, for instance, from the pedagogic form of schools). Second, the research aims at an educational articulation of the societal meaning of youth work by focusing on the public, emancipatory dimension of the pedagogical form. In line with recent research on the public role of formal education (at schools, universities), the notion ‘public’ is used in a very specific way: we will take the notion of the ‘public’ as a ‘term of action’. Hence we investigate how youth work practices include public forms of gathering that to a certain extent (can) disturb the given order of society (and can be emancipatory). By investigating the educational, public and emancipatory dimension of youth work in concrete cases of youth work practices, this project aims at the development of an educational youth work theory.