Workshop on Youth Participation - Working Group Youth of the EMC
The purpose of today’s workshop is to do a practical “exercise” in form of a generation game which will show the challenges and advantages of working together across generations.
The game has been prepared by the Working Group Youth, a group of youth representatives from the membership of the European Music Council. One of their main aims is to increase youth participation in music organisations in Europe.
Three of the members of the Working Group Youth are present here today:
- Regina Senften from the Swiss Music Council, Switzerland
- Petra Mohorcic from Jeunesses Musicales, Slovenia – chair of the WGY – she will introduce you to the game
- Daphne Wassink from unisono / Europa Cantat, the Netherlands – she will be the "jury" judging if you fulfilled the tasks correctly
Over the last years the Working Group Youth has been encouraging organisations to increase youth participation and involve young people in the decision-making processes on different levels. Discussions at different occasions and a questionnaire distributed showed that both sides often have a problem to imagine youth participation because of prejudices they have. One side thinks that “Young people are not experienced enough” or “young people don’t come to meetings regularly” and many young people think that “older people are not creative or unflexible”, they are “boring and are not interested in the opinion of young people”.
Today’s generation game can be kind of “reality” test for you to try out how it feels to work across generations, which challenges you might encounter, but most of all how fruitful this cooperation can be for your organisation.
Petra will explain the “rules” of the game to you. We will then put you together in mixed generation groups with 4-5 people per group. After 45minutes we will come back and will discuss the experience you had during the game.
15 minutes introduction / 45 minutes game / 30 minutes evaluation - discussion
The game:
For the game 2 groups of 5 people were formed (by distributing 5 yellow and 5 blue papers among the participants and asking them to get together as groups).
Each group received 2 papers with “tasks” of different kinds. They had to decide which tasks they wanted to solve (it was not possible to solve all of them in the given time of 45 minutes) and could win different amounts of points with the tasks. “Winning”, however, was only one aspect of the game, the experience of working together across generations was the main focus.
“yellow group” with people aged 22, 27, 31, 52 and 60 (average age 38,5) coming from Hungary, Finland, Serbia, Sweden, Greece. In this group the leadership was first with the oldest member who had received the documents with the tasks from Daphne, but later the 31-year-old took over leadership in certain situations.
“blue group” with people aged 24, 29, 40, 50, 51 coming from Austria, UK, Jordan, Hungary and the Netherlands – this group said they did not have a “leader” but developed the tasks democratically and in some instances individual members of the group took the initiative for a specific task.
Questions after the game:
- What were your experiences within the group?
- Who became the “natural” leader in your group? Why?
- Did you have a preference for a special kind of tasks in the group?
- With which task did you have most fun?
- What did you personally learn?
- Which questions were difficult to solve together?
- When were you pleased to be helped by a younger member?
- When were you pleased to be helped by an older member?
- Where you surprised in some cases by answers provided by people from other generations?
- How did it feel to be “judged” by a young person?
- Where there other issues than age important for solving some of the tasks? E.g. nationality, personal background, character
Rapporteur: Árpád Tóth, Hungary (also article for ECmagazine) – he reported to Jeroen Schrijner who then made a final report to the EMC Annual Meeting on all three workshops.
Short summary of evaluation round:
It was very interesting to observe the two groups from the outside. One group first spent quite a long time on deciding which tasks they wanted to do, the other group very quickly came up with the first answers. It also became clear that the groups needed a little time to “warm up” and get to know each other a little, the participants became more excited and more daring towards the end. For the jury and observers the two raps presented by the two groups were probably the most rewarding results – they were documented as films. It was great to see such a mixed group perform a rap together, especially since some of them had probably never done that before. It was also a great idea that many questions required the participants to get in contact with Hungarians (there happened to be one young Hungarian on each of the groups, but they also had to get people from the “outside” for certain tasks, such as the Hungarian dance).
The participants were delighted with the experience. They thought it was a great idea to have an active, participatory game, quite a change to what you normally experience in such conferences. They all said they had learnt something (to sing the Hungarian or Finnish national hymn, for example) and they all had a lot of fun during the game.
Most participants felt that a priori the age of the participants in the group was not so important, though one young participant felt that he always had a lot of ideas but found it helpful to have an older member help him “sort” these ideas and make the right choice. It was also remarked that the ways of finding solutions sometimes different, for example when they had to find out a telephone number, the young Hungarian got out her mobile phone where others would have gone out to look for a telephone book or a guidebook of Budapest. It was not felt as a problem that the judge was a young person, because she was very clear in the “guidelines” and showed competence – she knew the rules and made sure that they were followed and was therefore accepted as “authority “by everybody.
Basically it was felt that the participants over 30 who participated in the workshop were probably the ones who had already worked together with young people before and did not have any problems with this idea of working together across generations. The group therefore suggested that next time such a game should be offered to all participants, maybe as a kind of “Warmup” and different way of getting to know each other at the beginning of a conference weekend, since making such a game together makes you discover other sides of the participants.
by Sonja Greiner, facilitator of the WGY workshop
foto collage by Regina Senften
