Mentoring Children and Young People for Social Inclusion

Global Approaches to Empowerment

Òscar Prieto-Flores, Jordi Feu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000174571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Mentoring Children and Young People for Social Inclusion critically analyses the challenges and possibilities of mentoring approaches to youth welfare and equality. It explores existing youth mentoring programmes targeted towards youth in care, immigrant, and refugee populations, and considers the extent to which these can aid social inclusion.

The book compiles works by scholars from different countries focused on how child and youth mentoring has been changing globally in recent years and how these changes are identified and approached in different contexts. The book seeks to address what empowering youth means in different socio-political contexts, how mentoring is approached by governments and NGOs, and how these approaches shape mentoring relationships. It provides insights on how mentoring can tackle structural inequalities and work towards child and youth empowerment.

This book will be of great interest for academics, scholars, and postgraduate students in the area of inclusive education and mentoring. It will also be useful reading for social workers, community developers, and practitioners working in NGOs, as well as for governments looking for innovative ways to generate interventions in the educational and social arena.

Chapter 1

Critical autonomy, social capital, and mentoring programmes for children and youth¹

Òscar Prieto-Flores, Jordi Feu, Xavier Casademont, and Xavier Alarcón

In recent decades, the number of youth mentoring programmes has grown considerably in different countries around the world. The reasons that have favoured this increase depend on the context. In the case of Europe, for example, this increase is due to the need to provide a response to the new context of reception of immigrants and refugees, many of them unaccompanied minors or young people; while in the United States, the approach has been aimed more at reducing social inequality and preventing crime among minority youth (Preston, Prieto-Flores, & Rhodes, 2019). Regardless of the programmes' approach, their increase in recent years has led to some debates on how mentoring organisations can improve the quality of their programmes and promote, more fully, the well-being and empowerment of the children and young people they serve. In this regard, it should be pointed out that their empowerment can only be understood if they are able to develop greater critical autonomy and access to networks of social capital. Doyal and Gough (1991) defined critical autonomy as “the capacity to compare cultural rules, to reflect upon the rules of one's own culture, to work with others to change them and, in extremis, to move to another culture” (pp. 187–188), which requires the capacity for freedom of agency, political freedom, and freedom of action. And, as we know, even in the most democratic countries, such freedoms are compromised by the existence of structural forces that, explicitly or implicitly, constrain them, especially among young people from cultural minorities, migrant youth who lose their legal status as they turn 18 and become “adults”, as well as young people with low incomes. With regard to social capital, there are a number of definitions that will be addressed later, but one vague and initial definition would be the possibility of attaining certain social resources through occasional or recurrent support from individuals or social institutions. For example, Ibrahim, a Moroccan boy who has just arrived to Spain and is from a working-class family where only one of the parents works and neither of them completed school, has to face many more obstacles than a child with middle-class parents who went to university. Some of the obstacles or challenges the first child faces are (a) linguistic capital: not just acquiring linguistic competence in the new language, but also understanding the linguistic codes associated with it; (b) sociability and sense of belonging: having to establish new friendships and build a new daily life with cultural challenges due to racism in the host society; (c) cultural and social capital: having to cope with educational and social expectations that limit his/her action, as well as difficulties in accessing support and information networks; and, finally, (d) economic capital: not being able to access extracurricular activities that the second child can. Mentoring can contribute to the development of critical autonomy, especially in the first three situations, but the existing literature has not taken these aspects into consideration much because until now studies on the effects of mentoring programmes with young immigrants or refugees have been scarce or very undeveloped (Oberoi, 2016).

Generally, the research that has been done on youth mentoring has been carried out in the field of psychology in the United States. It is not surprising, then, that the focus of the studies conducted thus far and the analysis of the effects of mentoring have taken into account elements of analysis characteristic of this field; for example, the effects that mentoring has on the emotional support of the child or young person, on their health and well-being, or on their academic engagement. These elements have been central in much of the research that has been done up to the present and are part of the main corpus of the most recent meta-analyses (DuBois et al., 2011; Raposa et al., 2019). Another element that has been taken into consideration is the duration of mentoring relationships and their quality, stressing that longer-lasting and quality mentoring relationships are those that tend to have greater effects on protégés (Deutsch & Spencer, 2009; Rhodes & DuBois, 2006). However, the theoretical contributions that highlight how mentoring programmes can facilitate access to networks of social capital have been very embryonic, with some exceptions (Keller & Blakeslee, 2014; Prieto-Flores & Feu, 2018; Stanton-Salazar, 2011). In this regard, more empirical studies that take this into consideration are beginning to emerge, like the work of Shier, Gouthro, and de Goias (2018), which highlights some existing interrelations between social capital and a mentoring programme with minority girls between ages 14 and 17. The authors conclude that the programme they analysed promotes access to the social capital of the protégés and enables their social networks to expand through the relationships they had with their mentors and other agents. Another example is the work of Raithelhuber (2019), who analyses the support that a mentoring programme can offer to unaccompanied refugee minors in Austria, highlighting how minors perceive the ethnic discrimination they suffer and how their mentors can provide them with emotional and psychosocial support and enhancement of their social capital. It is necessary to study this area in depth in order to observe all the different types of relations that can arise between a mentor and his protégé, and how mentoring organisations may, or may not, play an important role in promoting these.

Before proceeding, we feel it is important to differentiate between sociability and social capital because they are distinct notions that can sometimes be confused, although they may be related since by working on sociability or extraversion the protégé will have a greater possibility of connecting with support networks than without them. By sociability, we refer to the capacity to relate with and trust others, both individuals and collectives, and for extroversion. In contrast, by social capital, we refer to relationships of mutual trust and recognition between people that facilitate access to certain social environments or milieus. For example, in the case of Ibrahim, improving his Spanish thanks to the relationship with his mentor made it easier for him to socialise more with other pupils at his school. Another element that helped was his continuous talks with his mentor about his being accepted or not by the rest of his classmates. These can help to relativise some erroneous perceptions (e.g. thinking that his classmates don't like or accept him when that is not the case) or give situations of concern the importance they deserve (e.g. bullying and racist attitudes). But that does not mean that, thanks to this opening, the protégé accesses networks of social and cultural capital beyond the relationship with his mentor.

With the aim of contributing to this area, this chapter focuses on clarifying how the concept of social capital is used in the mentoring literature, and on improving the understanding of mentoring relationships from a broad vision that fosters the empowerment of children and young people. The concept of social capital is one of the most frequently used sociological concepts in recent years, not only from sociology but from other social sciences disciplines as well. From our point of view, it is a concept that, at times, has been used vaguely and can thus generate confusion. This conceptual clarification, which we will undertake in this chapter, may not only provide researchers with a more precise definition of the concept in the field of mentoring in general, but also enable mentoring programme staff to take social capital into account in their programmes to promote the empowerment of children and young people. In order to understand and examine it properly, we propose, finally, an interpretative frame that takes into consideration the different levels at which access to social capital can be promoted, or not, related to critical autonomy in children and young people.

Definition of social capital and its relationships with mentoring

Two eminent sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu in Europe and James S. Coleman in the United States defined social capital in similar ways in the early 1980s. For Bourdieu, while economic capital can be transformed into money or be institutionalised into property rights, and cultural capital into academic credentials, social capital “is the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition” (1980, p. 2). The amount of social capital that an individual possesses depends, then, on the amount of network connections available. For Coleman (1988), social capital “is defined by its function. It is not a single entity but a variety of different entities, with two elements in common: they all consist of some aspect of social structures, and they facilitate certain actions of actors – whether persons or corporate actors- within the structure. Like other forms of capital, social capital is productive, making possible the achievement of certain ends that in its absence would not be possible” (p. S98). Both authors' definitions are similar, although Coleman's definition is more optimistic than Bourdieu's and only considers social capital as facilitating “positive” resources like school success. It does not contemplate the possibility that young people can access networks of “negative” social capital that promote access to deviant behaviour and processes of social exclusion, like belonging to certain youth gangs (Portes, 1998).

As well as taking into account the strong social bonds that some people or groups might have, Mark Granovetter (1973) also highlights the potential that weak bonds have for facilitating access to certain jobs. In this regard, it is interesting to observe not only how people can have a close relationship with their ethnic group or relatives and thanks to this can obtain work, but also how weak bonds can also have a similar effect on these people's access to the labour market. Later, the political scientist Robert Putnam (1995) draws on Granovetter's notion of weak bonds to differentiate two types of social capital, what he calls bonding social capital and bridging social capital. While the first are usually strong bonds that occur between members of the same social group or homogenous groups and can serve as social closure or intragroup solidarity, the second can play the role of bridging different networks and “can generate broader identities and reciprocity” (p. 23). In this regard, mentoring programmes designed to promote intercultural relations between young immigrants and university students can have the characteristics of bridging social capital because they create relationships between people from different networks who would otherwise not have met. But Putnam's conceptualisation of social capital possesses a number of ambiguities that need to be clarified since, as Ricardo Stanton-Salazar (personal communication, November 15, 2019) highlights, “for the sake of precise theory development, it is important to differentiate Putnam's Social Capital as either (a) network structure that leads to advantages, or (b) potential benefits that can potentially spring forth from network or tie structure” (p. 5). In this regard, it should be pointed out that one thing is to facilitate connection with someone from a network different to one's own (through a mentor), and another quite different thing is whether this connection brings benefits or not for those involved, especially the mentee. This last point is only slightly or not at all developed in Putnam's theory, but it is of great importance when it comes to understanding how such relationships can facilitate access to institutional agents or real resources.

Ricardo Stanton-Salazar (2011) also highlights the existence of an empowerment social capital “characterized by the provision of institutional support by critically conscious institutional agents, and comes with a socialization agenda aimed at transforming the consciousness of those they support, and at encouraging them to also become moral and caring agents to changing the world” (p. 1090). He highlights that these relationships can facilitate inclusion processes of low-income Latino youth in the United Sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Critical autonomy, social capital, and mentoring programmes for children and youth
• 2 The importance of being present: Mentors as “presence practitioners”
• 3 The role of mentoring and service learning in youth’s critical consciousness and social change efforts
• 4 New approaches to empower youth to recruit mentors in the United States
• 5 Youth-Initiated Mentoring: Promoting and improving the social networks of youth with complex needs in the Netherlands
• 6 Youth mentoring and multiple social support attunement: Contributions to understand youth social development and well-being
• 7 The methodological issues in the assessment of quality and the benefits of formal youth mentoring interventions: The case of the Czech Big Brothers Big Sisters/Pět P
• Conclusions
• Index