Working with under-18s

Now that we are able to work with young people in Teen Second Life for the Avatar project, we are facing what may well be the biggest issue of the project: how we approach working with under 18s in that environment. It’s coming to the fore now that we are involved in the Skoolaborate partnership, which is run by secondary school teachers - and also because we’re doing the intensive two weeks at a Western high school with a very diverse student body.

Questions come up like: how much freedom should we allow in the world? Should we let the kids try out the virtual world as they want to? Do we ban any desire to create and play with weapons And if so, at what point? How much should we try to steer activities and interactions? How do we avoid too much censorship of young people’s self-expression? (etc etc)

I think this is especially important for us because we’re not secondary teachers. Our work with VU’s TAFE students has worked well because that’s more or less our home turf, and they’re young adults who are seen as mature enough to guide their own decisions. But I think it’s a lot more fraught when dealing with younger folk.

We want our activities to be a combination of responsible and real - to recognise and work with what young people are into, yet not fall into traps. Our next steps will be to discuss this with VicHealth and the teachers we’re working with and I imagine will form the basis of some kind of position statement from us about this.