[Staff] On Youth Development vs. Child Labor vs. Client Relations
Global Kids has been in the teen grid of Second Life for over a year and a half at this point, and in that time we've had the opportunity to interact with the incredibly talented, creative, intelligent and entrepreneurial young people that exist in that space. Some of them contain so many of these qualities, in fact, that we've hired them to work with us on number of different occasions. Some examples include working with our afterschool program Playing 4 Keeps to build a game in TSL, coding the back-end of our in-world stats system, helping build sets and props for machinima produced by our Virtual Video Project, and even working with us on an on-going basis as a GK remote intern, our jack-of-all-trades in-world.
Over the course of all this teen-led work, a number of really interesting questions have arisen. How do you deal with young people as people that are working with you on deadlines? Where is the line drawn between child labor and youth development? And what does it mean to be educating the teens that are also working for you?
There are no easy answers to these questions. In my experience, many of these young people are happy to test out their skills by taking on projects with us, and view the working with a non-profit as part of their way of giving back to the TSL community. At the same time, it's also clear that many of these teens (naturally) don't have a lot of experience with the world of work, deadlines, client relations or invoicing.
In this regard, I often feel that it's better that they're having an experience with us where they can have the opportunity to learn these things. As clients go, the staff at GK has a lot of experience working with young people for their positive development, and we take that approach and sense of understanding to all our relationships with teens, especially when they're professional ones. Understanding when to set a deadline and hold feet to the fire (a potentially common resort amongst clients with their contractors or bosses with their staff), versus when you need to schedule a call with a teen to talk with them to see what's up and check in can make the difference between having a young person be stressed and fretting versus one that feels understood and happy.
From an educational perspective, there's definitely a view that working with teens in this way also works towards progressing their "real world" education. GK has always believed in project based learning and empowering young people to accomplish things of real value, and through hiring teens we are literally putting money where our mouth is.
At the same time, all of this does, inevitably, change our relationship with them. We are no longer just educators and that can add pressure to a relationship. I've often thought about how in TSL, when I'm on GK island I'm (technically) in my work space while teens that are hanging out with me are in their play space. When hiring teens, you're encountering them in what's most often their play space and transforming it into their work space, something they then need to work to figure out how to handle. And what happens then when they come to a workshop or event on the island? Negotiating the role of student versus educator has always been an interesting thing in virtual worlds where age and power are experienced in a different way than in face to face interactions, and add onto that the roles of client and contractor, and you have a serious bag of identities to negotiate on both sides.
Where does all of this leave us? Exploring I suppose. As I said, there are no simple answers to any of these questions. Sometimes working with teens can be frustrating. Most often it's incredibly rewarding, and watching and working with them as we together produce amazing projects is on the whole a very positive experience for me, and, I think, for them as well. Really, I would love to hear more from them about what it's like, as well as other people's thoughts on the matter.
