Crisis, Youth, and Learning in Ghana

• In Event: Teacher Prepreration and Student Achievement in Afrikan Schools

Proposal

Recent years in Ghana, much like across the world, have been widely described as a period of sudden, deepening, and multiplying crises. In Ghana, the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, high inflation rates that currently measure at over 50%, with rates for amenities like food, transportation and utilities rising 100% (Ghana Statistical Service, 2023); devastating floods across the country; increasing water scarcity and rapid ecological destruction amid an exploding mining economy; and a debt to GDP ratio so high that has now sent the government into economic restructuring negotiations with the IMF all of which have led to more precarious livelihoods and unsettled existing patterns of sociability.
In the face of fewer and weaker safety nets for many young people who are increasingly exposed to the shocks and impacts of these crises, this paper considers how ‘crisis’—as an experienced reality, as a discourse of political and social construction—is being taken up across youth-centered learning environments in Ghana. The paper addresses how various institutions inform youth sense-making about crisis and socio-ecological change and how these spaces are conceptualizing crisis in tandem with youth livelihoods; by examining how actors and institutions across these spaces engage with ideas such as crisis vulnerability, responsibility, adaptation, mitigation, and morality, in their education programs and through their official policies, programming, curriculum, and everyday interactions with young people. In particular, the paper looks at how moralizing tropes about youth lives are invoked, taught, and learned, in order to either assign blame for causing crisis or propose responsibility for responding to crisis; such as discussions on their perceived laziness versus their entrepreneurial spirit.
By attending to the logics and models of human-earth relations, wellbeing, the future, what and how to learn, morality, and relationship to space young people receive and are ‘taught’, the paper explores how these logics help them recognize and respond to crisis through their learning experiences in institutional spaces. The paper concludes with a discussion of how young people navigate these institutional spaces and constructions, challenge assumptions made about their motivations and morals, negotiate their own perceptions of crises and youthhood, and make sense of their current and future livelihoods amidst a precarious present.
This paper provides insights into how young people are experiencing and responding to teaching and learning about crises in Ghana. It provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of how young people perceive their institutional relationships and capacities in times of crisis, and raises significant questions about the implications for core institutions and their relationships with young people, particularly in terms of teaching, learning, kinship, and care practices during crises.

Author

• Yaa Oparebea Ampofo, University of Wisconsin-Madison