Experiences and Perspectives of Kosova Youth Across Learning Contexts

This article reports findings from an ethnographic study examining Kosova youth’s experiences and perspectives across two learning contexts: a youth empowerment organization (LUMI) and schooling. Specifically, it explores how various structures of participation shaped youth experiences, revealing a stark contrast between the two sites. Within the empowerment organization, youth reported humanizing experiences facilitated by structures of participation that reconfigured authority-youth power dynamics and positioned them as co-creators. In contrast, youth reported negative experiences of school due to structures of participation that emphasized hierarchical authority-youth power dynamics that limited their agency. These contrastive experiences facilitated a form of critical literacy and deepened youth’s critiques of schooling, the primary state-sanctioned space for their education. From this development, this research raises ethical and programmatic questions for youth empowerment organizations and youth studies scholars to consider, particularly regarding ways to more consciously support youth to navigate schooling systems they’ve become more critical of.