Youth culture educational reform and pedagogy

The discourse of globalisation and the knowledge economy are now front and centre of the ever changing discourse of youth and youth identity. Educational reform in Malaysian society is seeking to engage the problems of globalization and the need for reform in schooling as a prerequisite for social and economic development. The education of youth is as a critical prerequisite for national advancement and development. The syllogism that structures debate with respect to globalization, youth and education is that reform to teaching technique will lead to improved competencies in students and this in turn will lead to improvements in human capital thus leading to economic and social advancement. Missing from such a simple approach is an understanding of youth culture in its multiple forms as now being productive of capacities, knowledge’s and attitudes that are arguably often far in advance of what is taught in schools. This argues that often the action in terms of cognitive growth, glocalised competencies, collaboration, cross cultural dialogue and innovative creativity are found in youth cyber communities, popular cultural movements often portrayed as problematic or troublesome. Proper educational strategies in Malaysian schooling society require teachers to learn from their students and engage innovative pedagogy not as something to be taught top down in rote fashion, but as something that is genuinely open, interactive and dialogical. This paper will discuss this theoretical issue with specific reference to Malaysian examples and policy initiatives.

Breath : allegory, knowledge practices, youth at-risk

Youth and risk are artefacts of expertise, constructed at the intersection of a wide range of knowledges about Youth and so-called Youth issues: an intersection marked by institutionalised, scientific representations of education, family, the life course, risk, and so on. In this paper I suggest that the messiness of human experiences and existence requires knowledge practices in the social sciences that can rethink what counts as truth. These interests – which are grounded in the knowledge practices that frame the work being undertaken in a large scale, qualitative investigation of the cultural drivers shaping the alcohol practices of 14 to 24 year old Australian’s - will be addressed through a discussion of the ways in which Tim Winton’s (2008) new novel Breath can be read as an allegorical tale about the terror of being ordinary: and of the teenage years as being a time in a life in which the fear of being ordinary compels Winton’s key characters to seek out, sometimes stumble upon, and embrace that which promises to make their’s a life less ordinary. In these recollections risk is something that breathes energy and purpose into lifeworlds that are dominated by the institutionalised ordinariness of family, school, and work.