Building a Bridge: A Values-Based Virtual Learning Experience
Photo by Jacob Colvin
By Geoff Davies
The second piece of a two-part series delving into the origins and design of Next Gen Men’s online course for parents and educators, Raising Next Gen Men.
Read the first blog post here.
Next Gen Men has become a lot of things to many people since we first got our start in 2014.
Working with youth, however, is still—and always—at the root of what we do.
Since then, we’ve seen and heard from you about the impact our youth programs and facilitators have had on the lives of young people. While it’s different for every youth, it can be transformative. We’ve heard this too from countless parents, educators and youth workers who want to support the positive development of the young people in their communities.
And in those years, we started noticing a gap between the need we see, and what we are able to do about it. Sometimes, that gap is bigger than we would like.
So last winter, we started building a bridge.
Raising Next Gen Men began in 2018 as an in-person professional development workshop that NGM ran with schools within our network. Soon, we were hearing from educators outside of the Toronto area. It was a positive problem to have, but it was more folks, and farther afield, than our team could reach in person.
That’s when, and why, we started developing this online course.
Our goal is to inspire, educate and empower those who are raising the next generation of men.
Raising Next Gen Men, as an e-learning experience, is designed to synthesize the depth of research that anchors Next Gen Men’s youth programming.
We also incorporate into the course our own learnings and unlearnings, sharing lessons learned firsthand from countless hours of program delivery and professional experience working with boys, nonbinary youth, and young men.
So we set out, and we asked ourselves: What are the key intentions and frameworks that inform our work with young people? What are real stories and experiences that reflect them?
As we uncovered the foundation of Next Gen Men’s youth work, a framework for how to share our knowledge with others began to take shape.
Raising Next Gen Men begins with Curiosity, building a foundational understanding of key concepts related to gender and culture. We explore stereotypes and norms related to masculinity and reflect on where our preconceived notions about boys might originate. We begin the course with an invitation to think critically about what masculinity looks like in our own lives, and, by making visible the too-often invisible impact of cultural norms, we take a first step toward challenging them more effectively.
From Curiosity, we move into Empathy, the capacity for getting into the head and heart of a young person, and seeing the world from their perspective. We discuss relationships as the defining factor around boys’ beliefs about what it means to be a man, and explore how we can respond to boys’ attitudes and behaviours with connection at the forefront.
To the foundation of these two values, we add Courage, the boldness and vulnerability it takes to do hard work and not settle for easy answers. With this section, we take the understanding we’ve built and look for ways to leverage it with the youth in our lives. Our boys’ capacity to experience and express emotions has grown tremendously over the recent years of their lives. For them to hang on to their authentic selves will take courage—from us and for them.
Our final chapter is Equity, in which we offer practical next steps, tips and advice alongside an invitation to more deeply explore the intersections of different identities among boys and young men. We include further reading and resources to propel you on the journey to being the mentor you want to be.
We took an entire year to bring the Raising Next Gen Men online course to where it is today. We took the questions of educators and insights from youth, we brought in a vast selection of research and the highest-quality reflections of masculinity in digital multimedia.
It’s all there waiting for you.
Transformation doesn’t occur by accident, and trust doesn’t happen overnight. This course will help you become a touchpoint for positive masculinity—someone a boy looks to for advice, mentorship and love.
That’s how you raise the next generation.
From the Future of Masculinity, a weekly newsletter where our community’s hearts and minds come together each week to do the work, tell the stories, and build the blueprint for a future where men and boys experience less pain and cause less harm.