Posts Tagged ‘generational theory’
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Promoting a Creative Generation
Today marks the start of Promoting a Creative Generation, a two-day conference in Göteborg looking at the role of children and young people in the new culture and media landscape.
Taking place within the context of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation and hosted under the Swedish Presidency of the European Union, 350 experts and participants will discuss the creativity and cultural habits of children and young people.
Gunnar Seijbold/ Regeringskansliet.
Swedish Minister for Culture Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth says, “this conference is to learn more about both the possibilities and problems of the new culture and media landscape that our children and young people encounter. The digital cultural platforms create new and often difficult issues that, despite their different starting points, are clearly related. And it is almost always young people who are affected”.Keynote speakers include Renad Qubbaj from the Tamer Institute for Community Education in Ramallah and Professor Bamford, Director of Cultural Programmes for Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE), London.
The conference programme focuses on different aspects of daily life for children and young people, recognising that, today, children and young people are to a great extent not only consumers but also producers in the new media landscape. Sessions will look at how to strengthen children and young people’s right to culture, how traditional cultural institutions can find ways to remain attractive and accessible for the new generation, promote the exchange of experience and knowledge on how public investments can help to ensure that children and young people’s right to culture in all forms is guaranteed and will also include participants trying out the younger generation’s world of digital communication.
The opening and closing sessions can be watched via webcast
In the UK, very similar questions are being raised by The New Deal of the Mind coalition, chaired by the journalist and former political editor of the New Statesman, Martin Bright. The New Deal of the Mind is a grouping of like-minded individuals who believe we must not let the recession crush creativity and innovation. Learning the lessons of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal, the coalition believes the creative and digital industries can help provide a route through the recession for young people and others. Check out their latest report, ‘Do It Yourself: Cultural and Creative Self-Employed in Hard Times’, exploring self employment options in the cultural and creative sector.
Of course this blog celebrates how creativity and innovation are changing youth volunteering, but revolutionising how young people can share their time and talents with others is becoming of much broader concern, across many sectors.
Any thoughts on these issues?
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The Generational Theory
Along with this blog’s coverage of innovations in youth volunteering, it is important to articulate and fully understand the psychology behind the generation that most youth projects are aimed at. American authors Neil Howe and William Strauss have studied the various cycles of American society extensively and have formulated a generational theory that splits each cycle into four phases, or what they call ‘turnings’. According to them, each new generation develops values from its previous one but they are distinct from the following one, bringing unique perspectives to their roles in society.
The generational theory postulates that as with individuals, a whole generation’s collective personality develops during childhood, and this causes them to be risk-taking or cautious, for example - traits which then follow them into the next phase and more importantly, reflect the mood of the era.
In the first turning, children are given freedom, hope and security by their families, leading them to distrust authority. When they grow up, they start defying political authority as a result. This then begins the second turning, where parents focus on things like spirituality and self-discovery, leaving the children to grow up on their own, without a focus. This generation then produces the third turning, where, the parents being devoid of social obligations leads to the children being raised in an environment mandated by strict rules and regulations, even politically. Howe and Strauss give the example of “ zero-tolerance rules, laws named after victimized children (Megan’s Law, Amber’s Law), and endless political wrangling over the educational system” being indicators of the Third Turning child rearing mode, which is where we as a society currently stand.
The authors believe that the fourth turning, or Millenials, where young people are increasingly civic-minded and potentially powerful leaders of the next political environment, is where we could be now.
The generational theory is interesting from the point of view of youth volunteering because if it is right, then opportunities to volunteer (that enable them to be civic-minded and participate in the community) are exactly what this generation is looking for. Which makes the work of organisations in this field all the more salient.
If you’re interested in the theory, read Howe’s book Millenials Rising and the description of the theory.
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Obama on youth volunteering
This article from Newsday is a good follow-up to my previous posts on the state of volunteering in the US, and to a smaller extent, even my post on the Generational Theory. President Obama signed the Serve America Act a couple of weeks ago and requested the youth of America to take part in volunteering huge numbers. He states the completely different circumstances of today’s younger generation, that grew up in ‘the aftermath of 9/11 and Katrina, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an economic recession without precedent’. The article questions whether Obama’s initiatives to increase volunteering among young people in America would be any more successful than those implemented by Presidents Bush or even Clinton, but then mentions how Obama himself has done a lot of volunteering in his lifetime and doesn’t utter empty words not backed by experience. The article also cites Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, a book that documented the decrease in civic engagement from the 1960’s onwards, something that I personally think about a lot. (Putnam speaks of the concept of social capital and how that contributes to re-vitalising or improving the condition of a society).
Indirectly touching on the Generational Theory, the article also mentions how people born during the difficulties that came about as a result of the Depression and the Second World War were more service-oriented than the baby boomers that followed, and therefore the young people of today who are struggling with the effects of terrorism, war, natural disasters and economic meltdown are, in a repetition of the characteristics of people born two generations before them, more open to volunteering.
I thought this was one of the more interesting paragraphs of the article:
The generation entering adulthood is also the first one intimately acquainted with the most advanced communication technologies the world has ever known - such as cell phones, text messaging and the Internet. And we know that having a social connection to someone who is civically engaged is an important predictor of whether someone volunteers.
There aren’t enough youth volunteering organisations that reach out to young people on their terms. v is doing a lot to change this with vInspired.
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