You have just spent the last six years working on a masters and then a doctoral degree. Why should child and youth care people undertake studies at this level?
One cannot consider child and youth care a profession if we base our work on intuition and gut feeling. There is a wide range of learning which makes up the field — primarily, an understanding of people and how they function, and centrally and understanding of yourself. No circumstance we face in our work is simple, and our studies give us the perspective to apply numerous theories and viewpoints any practice situation, to the child, to the family, at to "mix and match" approaches eclectically. Many of us have had a "one size fits all" approach, a limited palette, for our work with people in difficulties. The advantage of in-depth studies is not so much collecting knowledge and theories but having the opportunity of going through the process of learning and change oneself, of being open to new ideas and course corrections while working with different teachers in different circumstances. When you build these attitudes and experiences, the adventure is just beginning ...

If you could shake down all your studies into a single paragraph, what have you really learned?
It’s hard to summarise it all like that ... probably that life is more than the set of circumstances we see around us at any given moment. For example, the teacher in the classroom may be hammering away at the child who is not giving the answers to the questions she asks. This is a very simplistic way of seeing and working at our goals. By confining herself to her aims and her situation and her questions she is not seeing his world and his situation. She has to think that this afternoon she will step out of her classroom and may find herself in his world where she doesn’t know the answers at all — or even the questions which he has to work with. The point is that it is I who must position myself in terms of being open to and seeing what is there. And this works also in a time continuum: from the perspective one gains from further learning, one sees the child and the family in a developmental scale — there is a season we are in now, but another season will follow. What I do today must be relevant today, but must also work towards being relevant tomorrow. So to get this into a paragraph, I guess what I have been doing is working at being me in a way that is also valuable to you.

What have been the central subject areas of your studies?
Nova University’s programs are coursework based, so that there is good coverage of a number of learning areas, with opportunity for the student to undertake specific projects within this process. So one learns about life-span development, leadership, management, computer work, research and evaluation, political process, social issues ... but my main focus was adolescence, and I worked on those things that impact on self-concept, identity, esteem, and so on. Within that focus I did some work on family violence, and also on supervision, but my main practicum was on the design and building of a therapeutic milieu for children and youth in South Africa. Tools I used included measurement of self concept and esteem to evaluate progress, and also the role of activity programming, more especially the process of involvement in activities. Then there were behavioural criteria to monitor, for example, how the youngster managed in the classroom, to what extent disruptive behaviour declined — and of great importance, working with teachers at developing ways of supporting growth in pupils.

How have these things worked out in practice? 
First of all, the staff in our program have had to learn new ways of working so that the youth can find new ways. In the old days we would have said to all the kids "How was your day at school?" and he or she would reply "Okay" virtually every day. We learned to work at more personalised dialogue like "I missed you today" or "How did you manage such-and-such a task today?" Initially the child was surprised by the new angle — "Where did that question come from?" or "What am I supposed to say to that?" This has been a movement away from staff imposing their expectations on youth and youth being helped to feel more responsible for their own lives, their feelings and behaviour. Staff became less parent figures and more support and resource people. I referred just now to the teacher in her classroom having to broaden her view and risk entering others’ lives and territory. So the child and youth care workers were being co-learners in the children’s life space, "We have to live and learn together" instead of relying on "You do this".

Studying at an overseas university must have had pros and cons for a South African? 
Nova was very encouraging of attendance at conferences and seminars, and by going to so many events in various parts of the world one became aware that we face similar global issues and we can profit from finding the common things we share. Also, we are all aware of the wide cultural exposure of children today, not only here in South Africa, but through the media the culture and knowledge of the world. Young people have vast knowledge and information at their disposal today; we are no longer the "controllers" of knowledge. It is not just an attitude but also a concrete reality that we are co-learners with our kids, that kids know more about many things than we do ourselves. I think another key insight I have gained is that child and youth care workers find themselves in an altogether more interesting place when they acknowledge what they don’t know. This includes not only the world of the child and the family we work with, but also ordinary facts.

Michael Gaffley, lower right,
with the team at Leliebloem

But Nova also encouraged the students to concentrate on their own programs when doing practicums and working at solutions to their own problems back home. This meant that, for me, although the university was in America, the work I did was closely related to my program here in Cape Town. During my master’s course at Nova, for example, we implemented the family support program here in Cape Town whereby the child care workers were trained to work with the families, and we had to work out not only the new skills needed, but also the territorial aspects of such a move. Two things Singer taught me were that in conflict situations communication should not be withheld: on the contrary it should be enhanced, and the child care workers in daily touch with the kids were the best people to do this; and secondly, people who were alike in disposition communicated best with each other. These insights enabled a radical shift in our approach to parents — in the way we saw parents — and therefore in the way we worked together ... here in Cape Town.

Implications for practice?
No easy answer. There are so many new competing ideas. We know that it is often harder to unlearn old thinking than to learn the new. There are things I think we must toss out the window. Certainly one of these is the notion that we will succeed without hard work. The expectation that there will be lots of money and that jobs will be easier doesn’t gel with the reality of children, youth and families in our country right now. Another wrong view is that because we are human service organisations we can somehow offer lower quality services. In a product-oriented society, if you don’t produce the goods, you’re out. In a real sense, staff must measure their careers not only by the material rewards but also by the importance of their roles and the experience of success — the feeling that what they do is worth while. Also, and closely associated with this, hierarchical and top-down management systems do not fit well with what child and youth care is asking us today.