The Komo Learning Centres "Do It Yourself" Clubs: Putting the Youth Back in Positive Youth Development

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday III)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Putting youth at the center of youth development: Lessons learned from youth engagement

Proposal

Many educational interventions focus primarily on curriculum development and academic content; however, as others have argued, “if schools focus only on academic instruction and school management in their efforts to help students attain academic success, they will likely fall short of their goals” (Adelman and Taylor, 2000). The Komo Learning Centres (KLC) Do It Yourself Clubs (DIY) program was launched in October 2017 in three Ugandan secondary schools to provide a more holistic and participatory approach to developing successful learners and improving the educational environment.

The DIY program is rooted in a Positive Youth Development (PYD) approach, specifically the framework created by the USAID YouthPower Learning Project in 2016, which puts forth four domains (assets, agency, contribution, and enabling environment) that they argue contribute to more active, engaged, and thriving young people. The crux of DIY is the “contribution” domain, or as we term it, “meaningful youth engagement.” YouthPower’s 2017 review of PYD programs in low and middle income countries found that “focusing on youth-led, rather than adult-led, activities, including peer mentorship and youth centers, can help empower youth to play a leading role in their own and their peers’ development.” DIY is aligned with this sentiment, striving to promote and achieve meaningful youth leadership by equipping members with a holistic set of foundational trainings that include lifeskills, health education, facilitation, research, and program planning, implementation, and evaluation. After participating in these initial capacity-development trainings, the DIY members take the lead, developing projects that address student-identified needs in their schools and communities. Zins and Bloodworth (2004) argue that “the best SEL [social and emotional learning] approaches encourage application of SEL competencies to real-life situations.” This is the key component of the DIY program – learning through the participatory process itself. From conducting a needs assessment, to planning and implementation, young people are involved in genuine and meaningful ways.

In order to be successful in improving student learning outcomes, we must also address the other side of the equation – teachers. Through DIY, we engage teachers in their own personal reflections and growth, and address harmful teacher-student dynamics. Training topics for teachers include self-awareness, financial literacy, youth-adult partnerships, lifeskills training, student-centred pedagogy, etc. As Komo builds stronger relationships with teachers, we move on to more sensitive topics, such as alternatives to corporal punishment (a largely normative practice in Uganda to maintain classroom “discipline”) and shifting power to achieve more balanced adult-student dynamics. Through these transformations, a safer and more balanced classroom environment can emerge—critical for enhanced learning.

Importantly, while DIY has an intense focus on club members and teachers who participate in DIY activities, our program theory posits that program effects will “spill-over” and diffuse throughout the school as DIY participants begin to adopt and model positive attitudes and behaviours. In addition, several of the youth-led projects within DIY include school-wide events (e.g., health-focused theatre, peer health education) that can have a direct influence on peers. We have also observed that as teachers and administrators observe these examples of student leadership, their own views on youth capacity and potential begin to expand. Cumulatively the pathways of change described above are expected to impact lifeskills acquisition for students and the overall environment in the school, leading to improved learning outcomes and quality education.

Using the YouthPower PYD Measurement Toolkit as a guide, we developed qualitative and quantitative tools to measure the DIY pilot’s positive youth development outcomes. For students we looked at self-reported changes in communication skills, teamwork, self-efficacy, hopefulness about the future, agency, classroom participation, gender equity, and school safety. We investigated similar domains for teachers, such as how they valued student contributions in the classroom, their assessment of student safety, and their interest in, and capacity to, integrate lifeskills into their classrooms. In order to triangulate this self-report data, we included the Life Skills Assessment Scale (Kennedy, et. al., 2014), which allowed us to use observational data to investigate changes in student lifeskills measures. The results from this pilot evaluation have been largely positive, particularly in the areas of student agency, self-efficacy, teamwork, and the quality of student-teacher relationships, where qualitative and quantitative findings (from teachers and students) supported meaningful shifts following DIY participation. Quantitative assessment of school environment indicators, however, showed some flat or negative trends. We believe that these longer-term systemic school-level changes will likely take several years to show measureable improvements. It is also possible that as students become more attuned to issues like power dynamics and gender inequality through DIY, they are able to more accurately assess these areas at endline.

We will use these findings and implementation lessons to refine our model, as well as share them with other organizations in our national, regional, and global networks. Two of our strongest collaborations have been with the USAID-funded YouthPower Learning Project’s Youth Engagement Community of Practice and the Regional Education and Learning Initiative (RELI). With YouthPower we have produced a video series about our youth-led work and helped develop the brief, “Measuring Youth Engagement: Guidance for Monitoring and Evaluating Youth Programs.” Through RELI we are working with other East African education practitioners to test and refine models aimed at improving learning outcomes.

In this session we will present our approach to developing learner-friendly schools, implementation challenges and lessons learned, theory of change and research methodology, preliminary findings, plans for the future, and collaborative efforts to move the field forward. We will encourage session participants to share their own questions and experiences, capturing key points of the discussion for dissemination to others interested in implementing youth-led programming.

Authors

• Matthew French, Komo Learning Centres

• David Kafambe, Komo learning centers