The participation and decision making of ‘at risk’ youth in community music projects: an exploration of three case studies

Abstract

In the UK, recent years have witnessed a considerable growth in youth participation activities that seek to involve children and young people in various forms of decision-making. One such form of youth participation to benefit from increased government support since the late 1990s concerns community arts activities, especially those targeting young people considered to be ‘at risk’. While there exists a developing international literature exploring youth participation in community arts activities, to date relatively little attention has been paid to issues surrounding young people's decision-making within participatory arts projects. Through an exploration of three community music projects based in the North of England, this article considers the nature of young people's participation in project-related decision-making before proposing the need for greater attention to this aspect of community music activity, especially in the case of projects which seek to engage with ‘at risk’ youth.

Keywords:

• exclusion
• leisure
• music
• identity
• youth culture

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my research participants for their involvement in this study, as well as the ESRC CASE partner organisation and indeed the Economic and Social Research Council for their support of the research project upon whose findings this paper is based.

Notes

1. Youth Music (2008) defines ‘at risk’ youth as ‘Children and young people with difficulty accessing activities that will help them grow and progress. This means social, economic, cultural or geographical disadvantage or a combination of these factors’.

2. For further details see Rimmer (2006).

3. These include the following: nature of project partnership; urban/rural setting; makeup of participant group in terms of their average number, their socio-demographic backgrounds, gender, levels of school-commitment and prior musical experience; human and material resources available; musical and participatory forms employed; length of time in operation.

4. In essence, my approach in selecting cases for inclusion in the study was to conceive of distinct projects as consisting of what Ragin (2000), in discussing diversity oriented research (i.e. research which seeks to attend to heterogeneity and difference), has referred to as a ‘fuzzy set’ of project variables. This approach made it possible to go beyond seeing cases (here projects) as collections of analytically distinct variables, but rather as specific configurations of certain aspects and features.

5. While a growing number of British universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses centred around community arts (and community music) it remains the case that many community arts practitioners set greatest store by experience and recognise that ‘any valid view of excellence has to be defined in relation to context and fitness for purpose’, where ‘the criteria used to judge [excellence]… will vary depending on the aim and context’ (Rogers 2002, p. 11).

6. This code consists of the following: ‘Be well prepared and organised; Be safe and responsible; Have appropriate musical skills; Work well with people; Evaluate and reflect on my work; Commit to professional development’ (MusicLeader 2007)

7. Dobbs et al. (2005) note that since community musicians are typically either freelance or self-employed ‘it is not only an issue of having to pay the course fees for the training, but while they are training they are not earning money’ (p. 22).

8. The names of all projects, places, schools, youth centres and individuals have been changed.

9. ‘R’ indicates the speech of respondents, while ‘M’ indicates my speech throughout. Where ‘ … ’ appears within quotations, this signifies an edit.