UK-German youth exchange formats, topics, outcomes, and benefits
Encouraging UK-German Youth Exchanges
Conclusion: Youth exchange formats, topics, outcomes, and benefits
Considering benefits and outcomes of youth exchanges, for both youth workers and young people, there is a strong value placed on personal development through intercultural learning and being within intercultural environments. Experiencing a new environment as well as learning to interact in that environment or with people from another culture provides a transformative opportunity for young people.
Achieving this requires exchanges to be developed with pre-existing (or specifically created) groups of young people, who access a youth provision within their country and then work with youth workers and a group within the other country to develop an exchange. Youth workers also identified that follow-on from youth exchanges was important. This included reflective processes and activities which enable young people to look back on their exchange experience. These enable young people to identify how their learning from the exchange might lead them to different attitudes or choices when back at home. There is a political and professional imperative in the UK youth sector for targeting young people in marginalised circumstances which is driven by the policy and funding landscape in the UK. UK youth provision has a significant cohort of young people in these circumstances accessing it. In the German youth sector youth work is open to all with a commitment to inclusion of marginalised groups. It is recognised that effective youth exchanges typically require partners working with similar target groups on both sides. Therefore, collaboration around exchanges including a high level of young people in marginalised situations may be required, and to some extent unavoidable given the drivers on the UK side. Maximising the benefit of youth exchanges therefore requires close partner matching between countries. This enables exchanges to bring together young people with common interests, lived experiences, and learning needs in order to maximise the potential of the exchange. It also allows for collaborative bilateral planning and design of exchanges. Thus, a mutually beneficial and ideally reciprocal (two-way) exchange was often emphasised by youth workers as central to a quality youth exchange experience.
A notable difference between youth workers and young people is the place of language exchange or learning about languages within youth exchanges. Young people have an interest in this, but it is not a high priority for youth workers. However, in the UK at least, the survey results may over-emphasise the importance of languages to young people, as a result of survey biases (see Chapter 2). Young people are interested in a relatively wide range of project topics and outcomes. This suggests quite some flexibility in the types of exchanges they wish to take part in. The principal interest for many young people in a youth exchange is to travel, interact with other cultures and make friends. Youth workers identified that there is a value to thematic youth exchanges, but that choices of topics should be led by the specific participants’ interests and determined at project level. According to youth workers, the topic or theme of an exchange is best understood as a methodology through which intercultural learning can be delivered. However, youth organisations with a specific thematic focus (e.g., the arts) may still wish to prioritise themes related to the work of their organisation during exchanges. Considering youth exchange formats overall, in person exchanges, based on stays up to 14 days, with small or medium sized groups are a consistently supported format amongst young people and youth workers in both countries. Attitudes vary on approaches to transport and accommodation, but there is wide support for a range of options. Youth workers outlined that a core part of the youth exchange experience is developing and planning exchanges with a group of young people in a participatory manner. They wish to support two groups of young people in separate countries to realise a common project.
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