Co-producing a Pedagogical Workshop Programme for Homeless Young People in Scotland: A Model of Health Promotion Intervention

Objectives: Young homeless people make up a third of those experiencing homelessness. The need to provide an educative approach, using Freire’s critical consciousness, to increase social inclusivity and construct new knowledge is indicated. The objective was to evaluate a pedagogical workshop programme, based on critical consciousness, with, and for, homeless young people and service provider to strengthen social interacting and increase new knowledge construction for health.
Methods: An action research design allowed the simultaneous development, implementation and evaluation of the pedagogical workshop programme. An NGO, providing support for young homeless people, acted as the partner organisation. Qualitative data collection included unstructured post-intervention interviews and verbatim quotes from post-workshop questionnaires. The data were analysed using content analysis.
Results: 13 young people and 5 staff members participated and co-designed the 8 workshops. 75% of the young people were female and aged between 18 and 22 years. Two themes emerged. The first theme was, ‘trust building and collective engaging’, conceptualised as the transforming of relationships, strengthening social interacting and enabling critical reflexive thinking: the behavioural features being ‘spontaneous social interacting’ and ‘context enabling’. This theme and its behavioural dimensions were conceptualised as providing the ambiance for critical reflexive thinking. The second theme was ‘constructing knowledge and developing skills’, conceptualised as sharing, lending and encoding health information and converting it into an understandable and useable form for behaviour change and social interaction. The behavioural descriptors were ‘information providing’ and ‘knowledge encoding’ for constructing knowledge. With the acquisition and consolidation of new knowledge we conjecture that there was also skill development (‘knowing’ and ‘knowledge conveying’).
Conclusions: Findings from this qualitative evaluation of a pedagogical workshop programme, based on critical consciousness, suggested that the young people experienced a strengthening in their social interactions and had an increase in new knowledge construction for health.