Thinking "youth popular university" as a participative space #ecil2018

The next session I (Sheila) will blog a talk given by Yolande Maury (coauthored with Asmaa Azizi) Thinking youth popular university as a participative space: focus on a speakers' corner experience, between a participative culture, citizen commitment and political empowerment. She was reporting on an ongoing research project, implementing a "Youth Popular University" (YPU) in a French metropolitan area. The objectives included seeing how young people were engaging (or not) in the Speakers' Corner (SC) experience.
The YPU is a "a space to promote engagement and participation", to enable them to use knowledge, getting them involved in local life and better understand the world.
SC is modelled on the actual Speakers' Corner in London, which was a place where anyone could stand and give a public speech and debate about any topic. Thus it is it is a meeting place, potential place and creative and inclusive space. The project was qualitative research, with an ethnographic texture, with observations and conversations important, and including an interview with the project manager. They have collected data through the implementation process, including the training session and first attempt at a Speaker's Corner.
Lessons had been learned from two previous experiences of SC. "Spontaneous but prepared debate" allowed people to raise and debate issues in a non judgemental way. These earlier experiences showed that young people did have knowledge and opinions and could debate.
The training with young people was organised as "The city as playground". This training was in a closed space (as a protected safe area). There were conversations in circles, drawings created and displayed etc. The second event was "Youth and Environment" (Free your voice) in a plaza in front of a station (so outdoors). There was an instruction to speakers to propose a sentence which they found significant for young people and the environment, and they had to capture this as a frozen moment (the speaker, a megaphone and their message).
Comparing these two experiences : it was more reassuring in the protected space, more theatrical in the outdoors event. In both cases the students could exercise free speech and critical experession. Maury proposed a possible "Speakers' Corner literacy" which centred on creating and promoting ideas, engaging an audience, and preparing for participation.
In terms of limitations, whilst there have been two events, there is not an ongoing speakers' corner yet (the project lasts til 2021). It is difficult to recruit young people, those who volunteer tend already be engaged with some of these issues, and it is difficult to get people engaged more than once. Therefore a challenge is to more from a minimalist to maximalist approach and there was some discussion around these issues after the talk