Exploring the spaces in between critical and social pedagogy and its implications for learning and teaching in professionally qualifying youth and community work education

In neoliberal times, young people are routinely subject to adultist practices, they may live precarious lives and can be increasingly alienated from civic and political life. Youth and community work plays a crucial role in reworking adultist power relations, enabling young people to enact democratic possibilities. In England, however, over the past two decades, social policy has increasingly undermined this work through ideologically driven funding cuts and a move from open-access provision towards individualised behaviour-change interventions. Despite such constraints, many practitioners continue to resist neoliberal framings, sustaining relational, community-rooted approaches that work alongside young people on issues that matter to them. This tension highlights the ongoing centrality of praxis in professional formation and pedagogies that, drawing on situated knowledges, engage the policy conditions shaping youth and community work and young people’s precarious realities. Against this backdrop, we explore relational practice as the bridge between critical pedagogy and social pedagogy, and as a threshold where their convergence becomes thinkable. Writing as a collaborative method of inquiry with students, a graduate practitioner and university lecturers in youth and community work facilitates critical reflection on students’ placement practices and explores implications for teaching youth and community work as a professional qualification in the twenty-first-century. Through this process, the concept of critical social pedagogy is seeded, offering generative possibilities for youth and community work with the potential to resist individualising narratives and reassert community, solidarity and relational learning. We propose writing as an ongoing method of collaborative enquiry through which critical social pedagogy can be further theorised as an emergent, socially just and equitable practice.