Enabling Spaces

The concept of enabling spaces has emerged from our research, policy and practice-based investigations of what it takes to keep young people connected to their communities and to learning. An earlier Youth Research Centre project funded by the Victorian Government Department of Premier and Cabinet explored the question ‘how can governments best support communities to work effectively with their most marginal young people?’ (Wierenga, Wyn, Glover & Meade, 2003). This work observed that the agencies who do the most powerful work with young people do so by creating ‘enabling’ social spaces. Such programs and organisations tend to start small, arising in direct response to observed needs of local young people, prioritise what is important to them, work on building capacities with the young people, and doing all of their work through the medium of respectful relationship.

More recently, in an Australian Research Council Funded project (Wyn et al, 2014 – working paper), we and our wider project team have been investigating these ideas and challenges more deeply. Recognising that 10% of 15-24 year olds have completely disengaged from school and work (The Foundation for Young Australians, 2012), and that many more are in the process of disengaging), our research team has taken a ground-up approach to documenting and conceptualising the real work that organisations do to keep young people connected to learning. Our shared conceptual framework has evolved with the concept of ‘enabling spaces’ at the centre wherein organisations and communities who are effective in keeping young people connected to learning – wherever they are – are enabling spaces.

Our team’s analysis indicates that an enabling space is underpinned by three elements: connection, capacity, and meaning. An enabling space has a richness, a completeness, such that the phenomenon is analytically and substantively destroyed if the three elements of connection, control and meaning become unravelled, or one of them forgotten. Connection is about the existence of real and perceived or felt links to people, institutions and communities. Capacity is about dynamics such as feeling safe, having a voice, encouraging and developing self-efficacy, or a sense of agency, skill or capacity. Meaning is about people having a sense of purpose in their activities, and about how they relate these actions to their own lives, plans and/or identities.

In recognising the diversity of strategies and approaches which organisations have adopted to meet local and immediate needs, we also recognise that these three elements will be interchangeable in the order they appear. Below we highlight connection, capacity, and meaning (CCM) in that order to illustrate the workings of our case study. Understood in relation to students, an enabling space is built on respectful relationships, fostering a sense of belonging and tangible links (connection), encouraging and developing self-efficacy, social and practical skills or capacities (capacity), and providing a context for students to derive a sense of purpose and personal satisfaction (meaning).

An enabling space is a creative field from which to acknowledge a whole landscape of relationships. It entails a set of respectful relationships within and around the project, activity or response setting, which in turn create the conditions for generating other respectful relationships in the world beyond. In an educational setting the relationship between enabling space and school becomes very important, since while schools act as enabling spaces for the majority of students, many do not experience them in this way and are often excluded as a result. A detailed case study is provided below outlining how schools can create enabling spaces as an integral part of their provision for these disengaging students. While this option has always been open to schools, a mindset has evolved such that disengaged students are not considered to fall within the remit of mainstream schools but rather alternative sites. This binary thinking tends to preclude schools from effectively catering to the needs of such students.