A digital strategy for international youth work

The Internationale Jugendarbeit.digital project is the foundation for drawing up a comprehensive digital strategy for international youth work. The Coronavirus pandemic has accelerated digital transformation – a process that the project hopes to support by systematically documenting experiences made with digital youth exchanges, analysing them scientifically, and drawing inferences to help shape future international youth work activities. The research project will deliver solid evidence as a foundation on which to build the digital strategy.

IJAB has teamed up with JFF – Institute for Media Research and Media Education and the specialist and funding agencies for international youth work to scientifically explore the learning effects of digital and hybrid formats and identify crucial success factors. The groundwork for this project was laid back in 2020 with a symposium on developing a digital methodology for international youth work. The project is divided into a number of phases:

• January 2021 to November 2022: Analysis of reports on digital youth exchanges
• November 2021 to July 2022: Participatory observation of digital youth exchanges and interviews with experts and young people
• July to December 2022: Analysis of data and publication of results

During the final phase of the project, a process will be initiated to develop a set of quality criteria.

A space for experiments: Living Labs

How are organisations designing digital and hybrid youth exchanges on a certain theme, independently of the underlying funding regulations? What have they learned in doing so, and what are their needs? To answer these questions, the project Living Labs: Internationale Begegnungsorte für Toleranz was launchedto complementthe IJA.digital research project. In cooperation with the German-Greek Youth Office and two partner organisations, one each in Germany and in Greece, two hybrid German-Greek youth exchanges are scheduled to take place between August 2021 and July 2022 focusing on prevention and resilience when it comes to right-wing extremism, racism and anti-Semitism among young people.

Both projects are monitored by a team of researchers from JFF – Institute for Media Research and Media Education. The project partners attend monthly sessions with IJAB to discuss key issues such as group dynamics, young people’s level of participation, encouragement of media skills and so forth. The project is funded under the Vielfalt erleben project of Germany’s Federal Youth Ministry, while the exchanges are in receipt of a grant from the German-Greek Youth Office.

I am another

Two non-profit organisations from Düsseldorf, Arbeit und Leben NRW and Theater der Klänge, have teamed up with two Greek partners, THOI in Monemvasia and Dare.Dance.Digitalize, to run an educational dancetheatre project by the name of I am another. The young participants work together both virtually and on-site to create video dance performances.

Silence is no longer here because of us - Young Greek and German Voices About the Past

The Memorial Museum Ravensbrück, the Ernst Litfaß School for Media Design and Technology in Berlin and the Greek cultural society Prophet Elias in Lechovo are running a digital, hybrid and on-site project on memorial sites and shared history. The young participants record their own podcasts in which they share their thoughts about certain memorial sites with their peers.

• Publikation zum Fachsymposium: Veränderungen und Handlungsbedarfe angesichts des digitalen Wandels internationaler Jugendarbeit