The four YAM Trainers headed up to the north of Sweden in mid February for the week long Instructor Course are all based in Stockholm and were hoping to experience serious amounts of snow. But on the night of arrival we got everything but winter – heavy rain and heavy winds greeting us. Luckily, everyone isn’t as obsessed with the weather as I am and even though the rain-on-ice situation did force some of the participants to take risks just to get to the venue (Hola Folkhögskola, Region Västernorrland) – weather was no issue for the rest of the week.
Instead, the Course quickly turned focus to the very important topic of where to situate the YAM pedagogy in relation to more common ways of approaching youth. One challenge of being a YAM Instructor is to let go of the idea that we as adults should tell youth how to act and react when facing everyday situations. In YAM we believe that this discussion needs to happen between the participating youth, ensuring a peer-to-peer relationships that outlasts the YAM program. That means that the role of the adult Instructor is to secure a safe space for this discussion to happen.
As usual, interesting discussions about this challenge came about, and as Trainers we were impressed by the complex conversations the prospective Instructors brought to being. Even though we use the YAM pedagogy also when training new Instructors, believing that ”the answers” lie within the group and the discussions they bring, we tried to support and challenge the participants by focusing on an important perspective: most youth already have many adults in their lives telling them what is dangerous and risky, how to act in difficult situations, how to tackle life challenges, and more. In YAM, we try to do something else by giving the youth a different and hopefully positive experience of listening to and supporting each other.
All in all it was a very good week. We ended it with a debriefing session with Instructors trained the year before that gave a pleasant the-circle-is-complete feeling before heading back home to Stockholm.
Post by Niklas Andersson, YAM Trainer