Young people, alcohol, dialogical methods

Abstract

This chapter explores the efficacy of using Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed as a way of understanding how young people co-produced the ‘AlcoLOLs’ intervention aimed at encouraging young people to challenge social norms associated with what we call Scotland’s drinking culture and make confident, informed decisions about the amount of alcoholic drink they consume. It attempts to show how using "reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed…oppressed people can acquire a critical awareness of their own condition, and, with their allies, struggle for liberation’ (Freire 2017 p.36). Specific challenges focus on the extent to which young Scots can be seen as oppressed (so in Freirian terms are ‘doers’ rather than ‘thinkers’) and whether the dialogical intervention that transforms them can be explained as the young participants’ developing praxis.