This spring 2008, I have had a rare chance of meeting 16 Dalhousie students who studied with me a course entitled, SOSA 3186: Youth and Society: International Perspectives; a special topic offering under the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
Our first week was devoted to clarify conceptual distinctions among “age”, “generation”, “youth” and “cohort” with an end of understanding the fundamental basis of the academic enterprise known as sociology of age relations. Here we discussed about “youth” as a relational concept and as a social process (White & Wyn, 2008; Wyn & White, 1997) and how socio-economic and historical forces shape our knowledge of the process of “growing up”. Who could forget the story of Nikki, a Filipino street child who despite his poverty has remained motivated in equipping himself with formal education? His story challenged our belief of “happy childhood” and made us question the life trajectories of those growing-up in developing countries relative to their counterparts in developed world.
In the class, we also emphasized that being and becoming youth is likened to a kaleidoscope (Brown & Larson, 2002), that is, across the world, there are different kinds of adolescence. These variations fascinate students of sociology of youth; taking “age” as a variable of significance in social analyses (Bradley, 1996). Then, the class learned about social theories, which introduced the broad terms such as structural-functionalism, socio-psychological and developmental approach, neo-Marxism, feminism and structure-agency integration perspective. It was in this part that I always mention one social theorist who influenced my sociology, Pierre Bourdieu and his concepts – the forms of capital, field, and habitus. Here, the class read more than 200 pages of classic youth articles, which in my view, is the foundation of what is known today around the world as the science of the “sociology of youth”.
My insistence to allow international perspectives flow into our class discussion using Mill’s notion of sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) as a frame. In my almost 13 years of sociological practice, I have been enamoured by Mill’s idea that in order to better see social reality, this process would require a quality of mind that captures the intersection of my own self and the ever-changing world around me. This is the reason why I chose to share my life story to the class and in return, I have come to know most of them, not only as my students but also as active social agents capable of dreaming and imagining a world that is equitable and just.
In my attempt to render quality education, the class was also exposed to the technical practices of academic writing; chewing every particle of the readings, clarifying ideas and themes of these sources, and finally, engaging with the texts to produce a solid argument that has both the academic and practical bases. The assignment, quiz, workshop outputs, midterms and youth research papers wherein everyone has had the chance of practicing the conscious use of in-text citations and bibliographic entries while striving to maintain clarity and focus of argumentation; all these were geared towards the acquisition of additional academic skills, which may be helpful to them as they take higher academic courses in the future.
The last four meetings have been devoted to team power point presentations and youth research paper. I witnessed how each group struggled to find a journal article that shall encompass their oral reports. As a result, through these readings, the class had brief encounters with the street youths of South Africa and Brazil as well the child sexual labourers of Thailand and female Canadian high school students. I am most excited to read the final youth research papers to be submitted by the class as final requirement. I hope the final papers would reflect all the lessons learned not only from me or the readings, but more so, from the engaging discussions and workshops that each member wittingly shared to the class.
I would have loved to take the class in other parts of the world, to see, witness and understand the lives of fellow young people – to know more about their aspirations, dreams and challenges, but “time” is not on our side. This is the last day of the class.
Today, we are parting ways on the same place we first met at Room 1198, FASS building. It may be the same location but I would like to believe that I, too, was able to take the class to other places whereby our imagination allowed our minds to question and draw insights on various youth issues and concerns. I have had so many significant learning moments from listening to the ideas of my students and I can only hope that this course was equally meaningful to them.
I will surely miss the 16 youthful souls I met this spring. I wish each of them the best of the future and the continued sharpening of the quality of mind we’ve envisioned to muster in our course – the sociological imagination.
***So long my dear students, until our lives intersect again – SOSA 3186 Spring Batch 2008.
References:
Bradley, H. (1996). Age: the Neglected Dimension of Stratification. In Fractured Identities: Changing Patterns of Inequality (pp. 145-177). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brown, B. B., & Larson, R. W. (2002). The kaleidoscope of adolescence: experiences of the world’s youth at the beginning of the 21st century. In B. B. Brown, R. W. Larson & T. S. Saraswathi (Eds.), The World’s Youth: Adolescence in Eight Regions of the Globe (pp. 1-20). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination: Oxford University Press, Inc.
White, R., & Wyn, J. (2008). Youth and Social Change. In Youth and Society: Exploring the Social Dynamics of Youth Experience (2nd ed.). Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Wyn, J., & White, R. (1997). The concept of youth. In Rethinking Youth (pp. 8-25). London: Sage.
