In the last section, we invited Leng Bin to share some actions of promoting Youth Voice with us. In this section, I hope you I want to ask you to talk to us about what kinds of service plans and strategies you've adopted under the concept of letting youth voice their opinions. During the promotion process, how do we realize the spirits of 'voicing their opinions'? At first, as I just mentioned, we actually built a website, and that was it. And then we realized that only having a platform would not bring someone to talk. So we have to start thinking about how to let children come and say something. And then, we realized that the biggest problem of Taiwanese children is that they never got used to talk. We grew up and were never encouraged to talk, even if it was only about describing our feelings. Even if it was only about saying whether we liked it or not, we didn't have any opinion. This is a structural problem. For a long time, we So, about the biggest problem of letting youths voicing their opinions, at first we may build a stage and ask youth to come up and say something, they don't really know what to say. So in my opinion, our entire program only started from here. After we finished building Youth Voice, we found that it was a failure. Indeed, and we have so many things that need to be solved. We have to let children have the habit and courage to talk, and then we need to know what is he going to say? He has to find what I call your topic of concern, so actually for Youth Voice, we quickly start doing the training on self-exploration and creativity. Through a large number of different possibilities and art education or experiential education that social workers are familiar with, we let children start to be aware of his existence. What kind of feelings do you have? What kind of feelings do you have toward this world? We start from something so basic, from exploring to talking about his own story. From starting to describe, from sensory experiences, from creativity, we start to develop the content and courage of a child's expression. It actually took us a long time to do the creativity and narrative training. And gradually, we started to see something, so we added some media values. What we taught was very simple. Children these days don't need you to teach them about any technique, they use their smartphones and film things every single day, and film-editing softwares are easy to use and have almost no entry barrier. So for us, we mostly strengthen the logical ability of Taiwanese children when they talk. Teachers in school may know, as media writing become more and more broken, the ability for children to properly finish a passage or clearly tell a story become poorer. So, after finishing self-exploration and organization of their own stories, the second phrase, after creativity training, is the story-telling training. It took us a lot of time to do this training. For the story-telling training, we did it through taking pictures and filming, multiple different forms. So our creative courses were divided into photography workshops, short film workshops, and we also had documentary workshops. Through different media, we conveyed different ideas to children. For example, the earliest thing we did was actually filming. It was easy for a child to get involved as he wanted to make a film. After he came in, he was actually in a process of self-exploration, and then he organized his own story. Also, in the filming camp, one thing that is more important to the program today is that filming is a team work. Therefore, everything you needed to learn in a team and any interpersonal thing you needed to deal with, took us a lot of efforts while filming. Weren't we simply holding a filming camp? In fact, we did it like social workers. Since children worked with us together, and filming was quite complicated, the collaboration between each other and telling a good story together were vital to children's peer and team training. And for a story to be good or not, it usually comes from whether you're sincere, honest, and whether the things you wrote are truly connected to your own life. At first, Taiwanese children tended to copy from local drama and idol drama, and everyone wrote something that wasn't related to their own life. That kind of things wouldn't be good. Therefore, through the filming camp, we kept on organizing experiences, working as a team, and sharing with children. So this is about the filming camp. After that, we did the photography. During the process of photography, we actually reflected on Internet usage. For example, I would joke about what teenagers love to shoot? Selfies and food. Every day, we learn from Facebook about what everyone eats, what makeup do you put on, and what kind of outfit do you have for today, as these kind of things are plenty out there. So images become a communication tool today. When we use fewer and fewer words, and we use more and more images, images become a language. The meaning of language is that every image or film carries a message. This message is about what you want to say to others. So our photography workshop, in fact, is quite like a kind of art treatment or narrative treatment. You keep taking pictures, and you say today I want to express something, so let me take pictures for others to see it. When you verbally tell others about what you want to express, you will see the gap between you and the people you talk to. This is the communication gap. Even if you talk about it, what you have said is not necessarily the same as what others have listened. Therefore, through the training of photo conversation, children are constantly learning about how to talk to others during the process of talking to themselves. So our photography workshops actually use some methods that are a bit different from what traditional photo agency would do. We actually use the portrait shooting skill. For most children or people trained by photography club, once they see something beautiful, they simply take a picture. They take lots of pictures, and they come back home with a thousand photos, pick the best three of them to enter a photo contest. However, we actually subvert this. We always say to children that photography is not an external reflection, it is a process of internal dialogue. So, you do not press the shutter because you see something beautiful, you press it because you find something in the scene that can help you express what you want to say. So, sometimes we use the method of portrait shooting. We let children come up with a topic at first, and consider about how to present a picture and how to express their thought, and finally, take a picture. This is a bit like a static moment of pause in acting. Actually, we did this kind of photography training a lot. the process of figuring what to speak, and trying to make others understand Whether it is a filming camp or a photography workshop, after several experiences, we noticed that in this process, Taiwanese children generally have an obstacle. That obstacle derives from not understanding themselves enough, so that they really are not certain about what to say. So, when it comes to story-telling and creativity, except for some children who have special experiences, we mostly encounter a bottleneck. The bottleneck is that children hardly find themselves in the real life experiences. That is why we later hold a series of courses. We call this a storytelling camp. We brought the children to different regions. If they came from a tribe, we brought them to the city. If they came from urban area, we brought them to a secondary city, to a tribe, or to a county-level town. We constantly put together children from different places in different fields. And through the process of local youth and foreign teenagers living and working together, children would have an off-site experience, or even a different cultural experience, such as tribal children come to the city and have communication between different ethnic groups of Han Chinese and Aboriginal. In different environments, they can compare the concepts between an urban jungle and a real jungle. In different experiences of different places and cultures, I personally feel that as a social worker for youth, I am most touched by seeing how children find themselves in the process. We later developed a series of service programs, more like talking about the touch of life experiences, but we have maintained a quite important element, that is, no matter who and where they get to, there should be a team of local teenagers and a team of foreign teenagers working together. Here is a very interesting example. When we came back from the tribe, children no longer asked why the tribe was the way it was, they asked us why tribal teenagers told us that they had to learn culture and pass it on, why they even had to participate in the fight against some issues, such as the development of eastern coast. In contrary, I have no idea what should I do when I returned to my life. I have no idea what the culture I want to identify with. Who is my community, what should I do for my community? "I don't have those things in my life!" This is a lot of children to give us feedback. Actually, I have repeatedly said back just what we are talking about This task of youth identity must be done. No matter what part of the work we do, we can not forget how critical identity is in the youth development mission. No matter what kind of service programs, it eventually in fact returned to the youth self-exploration. In report camps and storytelling camps, through different places and different cultures, we are constantly help children in a process of self-examination, at the same time to recognize other groups, then let them have a friendly interaction and conversation with others. That ability to talk, to share, is not only help itself but may also generate more empathy for the community and for others. We later do, that is, from the creative narrative to further advance to certain ethnic groups, or blocks, or cities, or urban and rural areas of an interactive program. Those are actually all more complete service programs and courses in Youth Voice. Well, actually from here you can tell, you are really from interaction with them to see the issue, and then evolved new way to assist children in the process, or provide a platform for them to learn. It sounds fine and easy, but I guess it's not that easy actually when you make those things come true. Have you encountered some difficulties or challenges? I think the bigger difficulty is that every child is quite different and unique. That has just been said. Throughout Taiwan, there is plenty of different quarters, different communities, and bringing up different child. I think that is the biggest challenge for social worker. In the other hand, every time we talk to our children we are going to do creative training, then I think the same, back to the workers, in fact, the biggest challenge is about creativity. When you see a child with a different life experience, come to you with a different background of growth, how do you do for him, to propose a suitable education program. Those thing is actually a process of change and circulation. There is none of Youth Voice, none of programs, none of courses even if the courses we do every summer, none of them could be the same. That means the biggest challenge for staff is to keep the changeable flexibility. in this plan, we even keep the flexibility of nonstop changing. Nothing is fixed in our course. The course structure may change if the children came in front of me and behave differently from our expectation. Then the staff have to meet together to correct it immediately for the whole night. I think the difficulty is that, as I just said, it starts to make a rapid progress nowadays. We hardly came up with a way of presentation and reading on the website. Less than two or three months, the Internet habits change, we have to think again what other method can we do to engage the children. That is, when you go to different cities, with different states and different problems, I'm not sure whether the staff have the ability to respond immediately with the amendment and I think it is the biggest challenge for me to implement the Young Voice Program. Challenge, Yes, keep that flexibility, and then while leading children to do creative, encourage myself to also be a creative worker. I often tell children what is the so-called creative training. As if we talk about creativity, we will think of of a variety of fancy things, then the school teacher may also think whether he should apply for the invention exhibition or something else. But in my opinion, we are actually working with children's creativity. In fact, it is a solution to the problem, and you always believe that there are other possibilities in the creative training. I think the one who believing in himself to always find a solution and trust there are always good possibilities in all situations is a very important ability. So back to the workers, how do we continuously create the children who have such faith in themselves, have the ability to solve problems, have courage to express, believe themselves with such flexibility. I think it is the biggest difficulty in this plan. Challenge, I think it is also very hard. That is, when we say we are giving rights to the children, we have to put down ourselves too. Right? Yes. As the adjustment you said, also includes that the children is subjectivity. If what I suppose today, what the adult world assumed will not work, I have to put down. Yes. Right. Yes. I have to put down. I am not insisting on it. I'm doing it for you. Let others deny my things. Yes, yes, I think that's what we met the huge challenge in suck kind of job. I think so, but I think it is a very important cognition when being a youth empowerment worker. That is, I could not make a bold assumption, even if this education plan became much better. You need to respond with amendment when the children come here are different. Then I think how do we see the demand, very willing to promptly amended, and everything can be changed for the children. All of these is a very strict request and challenge for the staff. Right, challenge. This is the value. I think it is also involved with part of the values and attitudes. So in fact, we did and you also did a lot of efforts. Nearly a decade of nonstop adjustment, we've been on this youth voicing strategy for a long time, would you expect that for another decade that when you see the changes from the past, can you share with us what you'd expect from it? In fact, our voicing program is moving forward at the moment. Progressing to the goal that we hope children can be their own advocates. That means those were basic courses and expanding in the first ten years. No matter in the education or in the welfare system, we think Taiwan did not have, or I should say forgot, forgot to give children those things and those abilities about ourselves and about others. Then I hope the children can go a little bit farther in the next stage. After you have known all of these things, you can take some action. When you do not speak out, when you do not take action That initiative will always be yours, so our next stage is to expand some of our education programs to engage on different fields. Together with people from different subject to work on the welfare of youth. Traditionally when we speak of youth welfare we think of social workers or maybe educators. So in this era, when we talk about the so-called well-being, it is actually a comprehensive one. It may involved everything from children's daily life. So on one hand, we wanted to involve with different expertise to work with children, on the other hand we wanted to position children as an acting person as well. This is what our voicing program shall expand upon. From voicing, telling stories, commenting to a point where action can be taken, What do you considered to be bad, dissatisfied, how can you take action and invite your friends to join you, or even starting a youth based action and invite adults to join, I think this is where the youth voicing can move forward. So you're making a Youth Voice 2.0 Right (laughs) 2.0. Citizen participation 3.0. Citizen participation also changed 3.0, then... Let's be a little slower (laugh). Then I want to say I'm happy today that Leng Bin has this chance. You've been my student for many years, now finally you can tell us what you're working on. And you've told us about the continuity, something that we hoped to do and hoping the youth can empower themselves, to care about society, and to take action. Well, I feel very happy in this process, I often say that the happiest is to see one's student stayed and work on the same field, so today indeed made me happy, Thank you for spending time with me and course participants. For students from around the world, for adults and youths alike, to know that everyone from every corner of the world can take action and voice for the youth. And we join together, work together. Thank you Leng Bin, thank you again, thank you. Thanks everyone.
