Youth Empowerment from the Educator’s Perspective: The Individual and Community Dimensions

Abstract

This research studies how educators help young people to be empowered. It is built from a pedagogical model of youth empowerment comprising nine variables: self-esteem, responsibility, critical capacity, efficacy, community identity, meta-learning, participation, autonomy and teamwork. Our aim is to analyze youth empowerment factors from the educators’ perceptions of this concept, taking into account different educators’ fields and different uses of methodological strategies. In this quantitative cross-sectional study, the survey technique is applied. We analyzed responses to a questionnaire obtained from 696 educators (including teachers and social pedagogy professionals), through structural equation models (multigroup analysis) and non-parametric techniques. The results suggest that both groups of educators see youth empowerment as a unitary concept, but with two dimensions: the individual and the community. Teachers and social education professionals share the same conception of empowerment and perceive their contribution to it in the same way. On the other hand, differences were detected in the use of methodological strategies when working with young people. The results are discussed in the light of the existing literature, and appear to confirm the need to revisit the differentiation between the formal and non-formal when characterizing educators’ actions.