Schools and informal education?

I started working in a school setting about three years ago. It was my first, full-time-in-a-school post – before then I’d done bits and pieces in school settings but always as part of an outside youth work agency. Some background: I have ten years+ experience in youth work (in the English sense of the word, meaning not-church-based, secular, local authority run youth work) and I completed my MA in Youth and Community Work in 2015.

Informal education practice is the foundation of youth work. It works like this: education can happen in a setting that is not a formal (so, a school) setting. Informal educators concentrate on relationship building with young people, collaboration with young people and empowering young people so they can develop skills and grow. Although we are the professionals with the experience and the training and the facilities to help young people grow, the young person is the expert on themselves. We can challenge, support and equip but the young person is the movement.

Moving into working in a school was more of a culture shock than I anticipated it to be, and it took me a while to work out why. I realised that, at a fundimental level teachers are taught to relate to their students in a very different way than informal educators. Kids have to go to school, it’s the law, however engaging with an informal educator is entirely up to the young person. They can remove themselves from the equation at any time. Informal educators start with a relationship, and not a tokenistic one. It’s investment, it’s unconditional positive regard, it’s saying to the young person “I’m here to do the work if you are”. It’s young-person-centred working. And this confused me a lot when I started to see how teachers related to students. There was more use of power and authority, more “I’m in charge and you need to do as I say” which was massively alien to me and it made me wonder how teachers had decided this was the best way to relate to their students until it occured to me that their training had been different from mine and we had been taught different things.

Here’s a good point to throw in a disclaimer: I am not a teacher. I have delivered work in a classroom setting and I have worked in schools but I am not a teacher, I have never worked as a teacher and I have never trained as a teacher.

Lets return for a moment to unconditional positive regard. In order to work in this way, you have to remove your own ego entirely from the situation. If a child is behaving in a certain way it’s not as a personal affront to you, it’s because something is happening with that child that needs addressing. The young person takes priority. You are saying “At this moment, I am 100% focussed on you and your development and needs” and this is the foundation of building that relationship with young people that is the central practice of informal education. There is no “you are disrespecting me” because respect is shown through relationship, not obedience. If the student already has a pre-existing relationship with you then they will know how to show you respect, because you show it to them in the same way.

I’m lucky, in that the position I currently hold in my school (I’m a school librarian) allows me to use the voluntary engagement element of informal education. The students see me in their social times and they can choose when they want to see if, if they want to at all. I realise that teaching is immensely different from this situation and their time with students is much more highly structured with less room for flexibility. But the conversations I’ve been seeing on Twitter from teachers and educators, particularly around the Black Lives Matter movement and the education of Black children in a classroom setting leads me to believe there are things to learn from informal education that could be applied to a classroom setting.

How do we put this into a classroom setting? How do we make out classrooms young-person-focussed? How do we build elements of informal education into formal education? I feel like it’s definitely possible. 

I really recommend infed.org for more reading on informal education theory. I did my MA five years ago and I’m slightly out of practise in youth work theory so this is a really good resource!