A few weeks ago a group of young people met in parallel with the trustees of a new charity. The young people began by establishing the 'rules' for their own meetings, and this copy reached me the other day.
It has echoes of a similar set of rules which I mention in the first chapter of Respect in the neighbourhood - devised by a group of 10 year-olds at a community project in Harlem New York. When I visited some years ago, they were messing with papier mâché, shaping the bodies of robots they would subsequently programme. They'd established the ground rules for working together: 'Robotics Class Rules'.
These are guidelines for mutual respect in a practical context. You can sense the process from the product: young people think about how they'd feel if someone was mean about what they were working on, then come up with measures to resist such behaviour.
It's a tiny but potentially profound experience of democratic empowerment and responsibility, which incorporates a sense of ownership over the rule-making process and hence over the sense of respect. Doubtless the rules have since been taken by some of the young people into the more complex arenas of later life.
One of the questions I ask myself here is how long you might have to work with a group of adults, to come up with a list like this. Our young people came up with theirs by themselves, unprompted and unfacilitated.
Interestingly the UK version was about process in the main, while the US version concentrated mainly on inter-personal stuff.
Mmm - what can this mean?
Posted by: Martin | Saturday, 24 May 2008 at 19:52