Asunción Llena Berñe, Anna Planas-Lladó, Carles Vila-Mumbrú and Paloma Valdivia-Vizarreta
This study aims to identify the contextual and relational factors that enhance and limit the empowerment of young people from the perspective of social education professionals.
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to identify the contextual and relational factors that enhance and limit the empowerment of young people from the perspective of social education professionals.
Design/methodology/approach
Bronfenbrenner's bioecological model made it possible to locate the narratives of the educators in the territory. These narratives include field diaries, i.e. hybrid narratives that include visual, written and spoken materials, and focus groups with 11 educators from different fields of action and related to youth empowerment projects.
Findings
According to these educators, the most important factors for empowering young people are their immediate environment, and the issues that affect them most. For these factors to be empowering, young people need to be accompanied, with support based on connectedness, horizontality and the creation of safe spaces and learning experiences. Both the microsystem and the mesosystem form the immediate reality for their action. Aware of this, educators do the work of connecting with the exosystem.
Practical implications
It is evident why communities are spaces with opportunities for youth empowerment, and the authors observe the need for more transversal and less welfare-based social and youth policies that generate empowerment instead of dependency.
Social implications
This methodology evidenced the environmental structures of educators and the dissimilar levels to explore and understand the work of educators and the complex interrelationships, which play an important role in empowerment processes.
Originality/value
This research presents a new perspective that allows traditional qualitative reflection to be embedded in the bioecological model. All of this sheds light on relational ecosystems with young people and proposes youth policies, in this case, oriented towards empowerment.
Details
Keywords
Verónica Valcarce de Veer and Paloma Valdivia-Vizarreta
In a socio-educational context impregnated by social networks, feminist organizations and individuals have turned to social media to spread their knowledge. This paper aims to…
Abstract
Purpose
In a socio-educational context impregnated by social networks, feminist organizations and individuals have turned to social media to spread their knowledge. This paper aims to approach how feminist tweets are produced to ignite meaningful informal learning (IL) processes.
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses an interdisciplinary mixed methodology. By using Twitter tracking tools, a database has been enabled to catalogue feminist hashtags into topics and categories for further analysis. These data have been contrasted with surveys to the managers of the most followed feminist accounts in Spain and Catalonia.
Findings
From an educational perspective, the analysed feminist hashtags have been organized in 13 different topic categories. The different propagation processes on Twitter – tweeting and retweeting – imply diverse learning processes. Moreover, tweets with complementary information such as images or links generate the most interaction, being the preferred format for IL.
Research limitations/implications
Researching with Big Data in educational sciences is a field in development, and Twitter data collection tools are mostly addressed to marketing and economic sectors; thus, free tools with limited services were used, offering the analysis of a brief and concrete situation of a platform in constant change. Although this ephemeral data and its relevance does not prevail over time, it has an impact on citizens’ learning.
Originality/value
It is the first study in Spain that illustrates the informal education that feminism offers to the community, facing the complexity of measuring Twitter with an educational perspective through the use of marketing tools.