I have had a wonderful career in Child and Youth Care work and I have never wished that I was in a different profession. About twenty years ago, I moved to Canada from the USA because I had met a Canadian woman at a Child and Youth Care Conference in Banff, Alberta whom I married after a long distance courtship.

My job searching in Canada resulted in getting hired to teach in the Child and Youth Care Program at Grant MacEwan College. I had a hard time for several years describing myself as a teacher. I preferred calling myself a Child and Youth Care worker who happened to be teaching just now. It took me 5 years to start calling myself a teacher and about ten years ago I resumed the self-label of being a Child and Youth Care worker who is also a teacher.

My most recent 30 days include these events and tasks.

I am teaching courses to both 2^nd year diploma students and 3^rd year degree students this year and enjoying this tremendously. I also supervise field placements, which keeps me in touch with practitioners.

I delivered a series of three 3 hour workshops to the Child and Youth Care staff at an agency in Edmonton to assist them in developing some new programming ideas.

I met with the Child and Youth Care Program Advisory Committee who are a group of Child and Youth Care professionals identified as leaders in the local Child and Youth Care scene and they offer great advice to our program faculty about relevant content issues for our courses.

I worked with a faculty member at a college in Winnipeg who is evaluating the Child and Youth Care program there and I spoke with a dean of a college in Newfoundland about collaborating on building a Child and Youth Care program in St. John’s. I am on many committees here at the college, because I am the Co-Chair of our program, and this is fairly tedious but necessary to keep our program viable at the college.

I am involved with evaluating a local community-based youth agency, at their request, and I am working with two second year diploma students who are doing this as a research project. I go on many agency visits to support my field placement students and get to chat with lots of former students, now successful Child and Youth Care professionals.

I had the opportunity to visit a college in Ireland last November and taught several classes to the students at every level of a four year degree program in Social Care. Now I am awaiting the return visit of the head of that school and he arrives tomorrow to spend a week teaching at our college.

I am involved with the Child and Youth Care Association of Alberta as a member of the legislation committee and we hope to get some movement from our provincial government on this. I also work with the Child and Youth Care Certification process, which is a rigorous series of testing for mature practitioners who can demonstrate excellence in Child and Youth Care work. We will be hosting the National Canadian Child and Youth Care Conference in Calgary in September 2004, and I am working with the program committee this month.

I am doing some writing for the new journal which is called Relational Child and Youth Care Practice and this is an exciting venture.

My hope as I work at a college is that I can create explanations about Child and Youth Care practice that make sense to the people doing the work. I believe that our field needs thinkers and writers as well as practitioners and we need to work together and support each other to try to blend these tasks.