ABSTRACT

Youth arts is a form of education that operates primarily through affect and, perhaps because of this, has not received attention in terms of its capacity to develop young people’s employability. In this paper we identify and discuss the much vaunted and highly desirable ‘21st century skills’ learnt in youth arts settings. Drawing on arguments first advanced by Dick Hebdidge and Raymond Williams, we show that while 21st century skills are learnt through affect, the processes through which this learning proceeds produces skills that are seen as valuable commodities. Taking the everyday seriously as a site for learning, we explore youth arts projects as a site for skills development and argue for a framing of micro-credentials that at once recognizes and problematizes this modality of training. We do so by outlining how our reading of cultural studies scholarship can provide a foundation for understanding the everyday spaces of youth arts as critical sites of knowledge production. Examining the intersections of identity, being and culture as pedagogical, we outline how the everyday experiences of diverse youth participating in arts might be captured so as to build pathways into the future based on competency in ‘the now’.

摘要

青年艺术是一种主要通过影响运作的教育形式，也许正因为如此，它在培养青年人就业能力方面尚未受到关注。在本文中，我们确定并讨论了在青年艺术环境中学到的备受吹捧和高度渴望的“21 世纪技能”。借鉴 Dick Hebdidge 和 Raymond Williams 首先提出的论点，我们表明，虽然 21 世纪的技能是通过情感学习的，但这种学习过程产生的技能被视为有价值的商品。认真对待每一天作为学习的场所，我们探索青年艺术项目作为技能发展的场所，并主张建立一个微证书框架，该框架立即承认并质疑这种培训方式。为此，我们概述了我们对文化研究奖学金的阅读如何为理解青年艺术的日常空间作为知识生产的关键场所提供基础。我们将身份、存在和文化的交叉点作为教学方法进行研究，概述了如何捕捉参与艺术的不同青年的日常经历，以便根据“现在”的能力构建通向未来的途径。