Activities 4: Adolescents' coordination

The essay highlights adolescents’ participation in the activities held during summer camps. Adolescents are more actively engaged in interactions than children, they are more encouraged to be active by adults and seem to be particularly competent in coordinating activities. In particular, they are competent in equally distributing participation among their mates and in presenting personal proposals dialogically, although ambivalences and disempowering monologues are not absent from their interactions. The most difficult task emerging form interactions seems to be conflict management: like adults, adolescents tend to avoid conflicts in their interactions rather than adopting forms of mediation, such as ballots, withdrawal from conflict, and elusion through forms of diversion. Overall, however, interactions among adolescents show interesting forms of empowering dialogue.