Interview

Project “YOUth Ambassadors of Non-Formal Learning”

Country: Turkey

Interviewer: Begüm Seyhan

Interviewee: Demet Lüküslü

Date and location: 21.07.2020 – İstanbul – Zoom Online Meeting

List of questions for the interview

  • Is the law defining NFE in your country? If yes, please describe what the law says.

Different factors working on the NFE and in accordance with this purpose, they’re giving educations to children and young people. For example civil society organizations (cso), municipality’s youth centres, ministry of youth and sports’ youth centres, ministry of national education’s public education centres. All of those actors show us that they’re working within the legal framework.

  • Please describe the existing strategies, action plans that define nonformal learning in your country?

Many people who perform studies about youth and youth policies like me are criticize that the ministry of youth and sports is mostly concentrating on the sport side, ignoring the youth side. Ministry of youth and sports can focus on the youth side. We can say that in Turkey when we’re talking about education most of people think of the ministry of national education.

  • Have you been involved in the development of a strategy / action plan / law in excess of the NFE issues?

I participated in the ministry of development’s last two development plans in the youth committee. One of them was five years ago, and when we look back there is lots of things chanced rapidly. Both civil society organizations and the community started to working on youths much more when compared to past.

  • Do you work on promoting NFE and how?

We achieved studies about an Erasmus project which is about non-formal education with civil society   organization (cso) which is called Partibridges. The project has two aim to create module, online and face-to-face. We performed studies about those goals. Also we achieved studies for the Partispace project which about non-formal education and how young people experience that. We made an observation in Eskisehir Tepebasi Municipality’s youth centre. We had meetings both volunteers and instructors. After all those researches and meetings Berrin Osmanoglu and I published an article called “Youth Work in Turkey” at Social Sciences Open Access Journal.

  • For your institution/CSO how young people recognize NFE?

I’m at the sociology department so our students are giving weight to non-formal education and relations with the civil society organizations. And our university promoting that. Because of that our students are aware of the importance of this social responsibility projects and volunteering in the civil society organizations. When we compared that with twenty years ago (approximately), people giving more weight to those kind of projects. In the Partispace project we criticised a part. For the volunteer projects, aim of the writing them to the CV is taking precedence over doing those volunteering to change something or do something. Putting a check mark is started to be the goal.

  • What are you doing about NFE in term to make closeness with youth?

Partibridges project that I mentioned, Eksi 25 association in Eskisehir, Tepebasi Municipality Youth Centre are our project partners in Turkey. Also we can count the seminars that I conducted to the civil society organizations and the speeches that I gave at the meetings. We performed studies with the TEGEV and Toplum Gönüllüleri Vakfı (community volunteers foundation).

  • Have you involved young people in the process of bringing about things that are relevant to non-formal education?

The module that we created for the Partibridges Project have two actualiser, one of them is a graduate student and the other one is a doctoral student. They made the actual moderation. Except that we had a team which is consist of the sociology students. We did the face-to-face module and now we’re doing online module with the same team. We used a new method which is action research for the Partispace Project. The goal is conducting a research with the young people and learning from each other.

  • Should the Government get involved and make an even bigger contribution when it we are speaking about youth and policies about youth?

I defend an opinion that we need powerful and active youth policies to solve young people’s problems in Turkey. I think that we can fight with the inequalities between youths and we can strengthen the young people. Youth category isn’t equal in itself and there is social economic inequalities. And this affect young person’s future career. We need powerful youth policies to get rid of this loop. For this problems young people need some opportunities like scholarships and sheltering opportunities. We need powerful youth policies to remove inequalities which are come from the family. We need a youth policy to remove social gender inequalities. We need youth policies to solve young people’s problems. And we have to change the policies when the problems are changed.