Editorial: The Civic and Political Participation of Young People: Current Changes and Educational Consequences

Current Changes and Educational ConsequencesAcademic concern with political participation is now well established, and research on the participation of young people has been expanding.Fueling this growth is both the recognition of a preoccupying trend-young people are disengaging from more traditional and institutional forms of participation-and of their strong presence and influence in movements that are led by or largely made up of young people-e.g., the March for Our Lives in the United States, the Fridays For Future, first in Europe and then globally, or the Hong Kong democracy movement.This double recognition and its tensions has been challenging the field to look again at educational institutions and to how they contribute to the political education of youth, and to understand how new possibilities, new foci and new repertoires have been transforming the ways young people understand political action, and themselves as political actors.In What Is Youth Political Participation?Literature Review on Youth Political Participation and Political Attitudes, Weiss takes a close look at the literature on youth political participation in contemporary Europe.Interestingly she concludes that existing definitions of political participation can be used to capture the political participation of young people, but she finds them falling short in accounting for new modes of participation that are common among young people (e.g., online or expressive) and in paying adequate attention to non-participation.After reviewing the differences between the political participation of adults and young people, she also emphasizes the need to further the research on youth-specific definitions, explanations and measurements.This is taken one step further by Biswas in her paper Letting Teach: Gen Z as Socio-Political Educators in an Overheated World.Taking a childist stance, she makes the case for a reconfiguration of socio-political education where the roles of children and young people go beyond being taught, that acknowledges the contributions of children and young people to political participation and to how it can be understood, and learns from them.Recognizing how Gen Z has been exploring the possibilities of large scale connective action in movements such as #FridaysforFuture which simultaneously resist adultist positions, bring things to say into the intergenerational dialogue about the future, and challenge the minor political role of "minors".Education institutions can play an important role in this by valuing, fostering and recognizing how students are engaging with pressing social topics within and beyond the school, and transforming citizenship and political education to become part of an intergenerational relationship where adults can teach but also learn with and from children.