Inclusive financial literacy education for inspiring a critical financial consciousness: an experiment in partnership with marginalised youth

ABSTRACT

In the absence of critical inquiry, traditional financial literacy education risks socialising economically marginalised groups into an acceptance of the very power structures that created their marginalisation in the first place. The instructor-facilitator seeking to confront the challenge of promoting critical thinking about a subject widely accepted to be factual and esoteric faces considerable obstacles. Adoption of inclusive pedagogies in the design and delivery of financial literacy workshops offers a means of challenging positivist notions of ‘authentic knowledge’ in finance. This paper brings the socially constructed nature of finance to the forefront and offers reflections on our experience with a series of student-led workshops intended to advance financial literacy and a critical financial consciousness in economically marginalised youth, some of whom have been marginalised by the formal education system as well.

KEYWORDS:

• Financial literacy
• marginalised youth
• inclusive pedagogy

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• A20
• G1

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented to participants in the York University Symposium for the Scholarship of Engagement. Commentary by Shelina Karmali, Executive Director of PEACH delivered at that Symposium as well as comments and suggestions by other participants are gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank members of the PEACH research advisory group, and especially Shelina Karmali and Don Dippo, for insightful comments, advice and direction over the course of the project. Our work with community agency partners in the Black Creek Financial Action Network inspired our approach. This project benefited tremendously from the participation and input of students Andy Atkins, Harold Astudillo, Hayet Coghlan, Jordan Davis, Avon Duah-amankwah, Abdirahman Hashi, Jameelah Henry, Jermaine Johnson, Femi Lawson, Dalubuhle Ndlovu, and Joshua Vincent. We thank two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions on a previous draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Similar challenges posed by various expressions of resistance face educators seeking to support non-traditional students along their path into post-secondary education; see Medovarski, Sanders, and Spotton Visano (2015).

2 See Coffey and Farrugia (2014), who unpack the concept of agency, emphasising agency as a generative, dynamic process of negotiating the relationship between embodied subjectivities and forms of power.

3 In addition to basic financial skills training, youth in the Development Workshops participated in a 2-hour skills-building workshop designed to introduce them to basic facilitation skills, including active listening.

4 Youth-developers were paid a 50% premium on the minimum wage (1.5*10$C) for a total of 192 person hours ($2880) and youth-consultants were paid minimum wage for 152 person hours ($1520). In addition, while two graduate students participated initially, in any subsequent round, only one graduate student would need to be hired to work with the youth. At our rates, the graduate student was paid a rate approximately equal to the university’s unionised rate for graduate student assistance, which is double the minimum wage, for 4 months (2*$10C for 5 hours per week for 4 months = $1600).

Additional information

Funding

Financial support from the Social Enterprise Development and Innovations, SEDI (now Prosper Canada), is gratefully acknowledged.