Cultivating an ethos: collegial co-discovery in a Children and Youth University

ABSTRACT

Since 2011, the McMaster Children and Youth University has offered free monthly lectures on the campus of McMaster University. Though aimed at children and youth aged seven to fourteen, there are no formal age restrictions and events regularly see attendance by young people beyond both thresholds of this age range. A central aim and guiding principle of the program has been to promote and support participants’ discovery of themselves as acting subjects in knowledge practices, including the production of new knowledge. Placing our model of the children’s university in comparative perspective with programs in Europe and Hawaii that share important aspects of this vision, we elaborate the bases of an ethos of collegial co-discovery urging young participants to question, discover, and create. The university setting presents particular challenges that call for careful attention to conventional practices and commitments and the sorts of relationships they variously enable or foreclose. Taking young people seriously as bona fide bearers and producers of knowledge relies to a significant extent on our ability to embrace a strengths-based view of childhood and to confront relations of power predisposed toward authorizing some voices to the exclusion of others.

KEYWORDS:

• Voice
• subjecthood
• children’s university
• children
• youth
• co-discovery

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under grant number 435-2014-1045. The authors would like to thank the Joyce Family Foundation, McMaster University (Office of the Provost), and the Hamilton Community Foundation (the ABACUS program) for their financial support, in part, for the McMaster Children and Youth University program

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Kinohe Gomes. Director of Operations, Nā Pua No `eau. Personal communication. Honolulu, HI. 25 July 2016.

2 An early and memorable example was brought to our attention by the parent of an eight-year old girl following a 2011 MCYU lecture event exploring senses in which children and youth are important political actors in their own right. Moved to see herself in this light, she had taken up a community cause of interest and importance to her and, drawing on her own insights to adapt what she took from the lecture, publicly engaged local officials on the matter in a formal proceeding.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under [grant number 435-2014-1045].