Youth Voice

 The SCEN Youth Voice is a group of students from across Scotland that represent their peers in giving feedback, suggestions, and ideas to SCEN about its work. 

The SCEN Youth Voice is about ensuring that young people learning Mandarin and about China have a central role in informing and directing the work of SCEN. An important part of this is ensuring that students already learning Mandarin have the opportunity to encourage other young people, in Primary and in the early stages of Secondary school, of the value of studying Mandarin as a modern language through school and beyond. We also aim to highlight for young people the importance of China economically, politically and culturally, throughout these early decades of the twenty first century.

In the past, this has meant a SCEN Youth Committee which held face-to-face meetings (usually in Edinburgh) and other such meetings where young people associated with SCEN, including SCEN Ambassadors, met to discuss our work and about the promotion of the learning of Mandarin across Scotland.

Such meetings became impossible because of the pandemic. Leave of absence for young people to attend out of school meetings became increasingly impossible because of the many pressures on schools.

The situation in schools post pandemic means that SCEN Youth Voice will, in the future, be primarily organised online.

Plans are at an early stage, but the intention is to work with the Confucius Institute for Scotland’s Schools (CISS) to create a platform for SCEN. One of the recent successes of online learning from 2020 has been the role of the online education forum E-sgoil in creating online communities for student learning and other engagement across Scotland. It is our intention to work with E-sgoil in establishing networks of young people, part of SCEN, who, in a safe and secure environment, can be a central part of our work. Through this online engagement we should be able to reach schools and young people in all parts of Scotland, and not merely the central belt which has been a prime focus pre-pandemic.

In the early part of 2021, we saw some early signs of the kind of engagement which Youth Voice will enable. Young people, school and university students as well as recent school leavers, were able to engage in the discussion about the development of the new SCEN website.

School students in S5/6 will have an important part in Youth Voice, but just as important is engagement with younger students especially S3, as they will have two or three years ahead of them in school and will help ensure continuity and sustainability in Youth Voice.

Another priority is developing our link with university students, most notably (though not exclusively) with students studying Mandarin. We are currently in discussion with the students leading the China Futures Society within the University of Edinburgh, and are working to develop more links with other similar university groups and societies.

To find out more about Youth Voice in SCEN contact Rosemary Mitchell at Youth Voice@scen.info