Making activities positive: Sampling, Doing, Reflecting

The definition of positive activities is something we’ve explored on this blog before, and I was encouraged to reflect more on it today after seeing a presentation by Jaime of WotsOn4U in Cumbria (incidentally making great selective use of Twitter to promote activities) about the way they have been seeking out activities to promote through their website.

Jaime showed a range of different activities that young people might take part in, from formal organised youth clubs through to a trip to the town centre to go shopping. Spending Saturday shopping was also a suggestion made by a number of young people Blackburn when we asked them to put together imagined activity diaries in a recent research excercise.

Whilst heading to the shops is unlikely to feature in positive activity listings in Plings, and it probably wouldn’t qualify within the formal definition of positive activities - it does encourage us to reflect not just on what is a positive activity, but what makes an activity, or a week of activities planned by a young person, positive.
Recent work by Participle may offer us some clues. In their work with young people to explore creating a new form of youth development service they looked at three type of experience which could be seen to be part of youth development:

(c) Participle. See http://www.participle.net/blog/view/4/158 for original.

Participle describe doing and sampling activities:

Doing experiences are self-designed projects where young people meet a need or goal in the family, community or workplace. A doing experience could be working with an adult to build a shed, running a campaign to reduce plastic bag usage or setting up a bike fixing business.

…

Sampling experiences aim to expand young people’s sense of what’s possible by introducing them to new people, places and world views.

And reflective experiences offer young people an opportunity to look at what they have been involved in and draw learning from it. Sites like WotsOn4U are already implicity providing some routes to reflection – by inviting and encouraging young people to review media, films and experiences they have been involved in – but there is much more for information providers to draw from Participle’s model.

Right now most activity information is (rightly) about the sorts of experiences described above as ‘Sampling’ experiences. But often it’s not communicated as such. Do we encourage young people to try out an activitity? Or does the presentation of it suggest you need to sign-up and make an in-depth committment to it? And are we designing activity information to exposed young people to a wide range of possibilities, or only a narrow set of things that they were already looking for?

And how can activity information sources become more interactive, to provide more opportunities for reflection?

As we plan for the next phases of the Plings project these are things we hope to explore – but we’d love to get your ideas too…