Youth Arts As Popular Education: Young People Learning through Art at the Edges of the Creative Industries

Youth arts is a form of education that operates primarily through affect and, perhaps because of this, has not received attention in terms of its capacity to develop young people’s employability. In this paper we draw on new empirical data from our Australian Research Council funded industry linkage project 'VITAL ARTS: Skilling young people for their futures'. We identify and discuss the highly desirable ‘21st century skills’ learnt in youth arts settings. Drawing on resources from sociology of youth, arts and British cultural studies, we show that while 21st century skills are learnt through affect, the processes through which this learning proceeds also produces skills that need to be seen as valuable commodities. Taking the everyday seriously as a site for learning, we explore youth arts projects as a site for skills development and argue for a framing of micro-credentials that at once recognizes and problematizes this modality of training. We do so by outlining how our reading of interdisciplinary approaches to scholarship on art as a means of learning and site of social change. This approach can provide a foundation for understanding the everyday spaces of youth arts as critical sites of knowledge production. Examining the intersections of identity, being and culture as pedagogical, we outline how the everyday experiences of diverse youth participating in arts might be captured so as to build pathways into the future based on their competency in ‘the now’.