In summary:
- Individuals in the class, engaged in high risk occupations such as drinking, drugging, and gang related behaviour.
- There was limited opportunities for individuals to engage in health promoting activities.
- Learners did not interrogate their occupational choices and seemed to lack agency in making decisions that could promote their occupational engagement.
- The school and classroom environment, was not one in which productive thinking could take place – thus the learners have limited ability to reflect. All of this occurred within a social context where learners were expected to amount to little.
Larson (2006) indicates that when an adolescent is motivated by challenge it energizes them to engage actively towards their own development. This has the potential to develop the agency required to participate constructively in society (Larson, 2006). The fact that learners lacked these sorts of challenging opportunities therefore constrained their own development and the possibility of promoting their productive participation. Learners acknowledged that it was the context of Lavender Hill, coupled with their own thinking about the possibilities available to them, which constrained the development of their occupational potential. This mutual understanding was achieved through the initiation phase of the campaign. This understanding resulted in identifying their need to find and access opportunities that they would appeal and challenge them and to reflect on how they utilized opportunities. The (Yuval-Davis, 2006) concept behind the campaign was that expanding the individuals’ horizons through opportunities for them to test what they wanted to participate in, could act as a catalyst to encourage future transformation and possibly initiate their participation in an occupation. While this phase aimed to establish the focus of the intervention, it is clear that the way that she developed understanding guided and set the tone for the intervention.
