Teachers and/or students

Jack Phelan

Sitting in a number of meetings with Child and Youth Care educators, I was asking myself how educators fit into the role of working as a Child and Youth Care professional.

I spoke about going back to the front-line as a worker in 1998 to do a field placement, in the same way that our students do this, and truly enjoying the opportunity as well as experiencing relief and a renewal of confidence that I was still good at the work and really enjoyed being in the unit with youth. Another colleague spoke about enjoying a similar experience and the chance to see if he could work through being rusty and out of practice, which was fun for him.

We discussed whether we are still in a Child and Youth Care role. I think that my role is to create an articulation of the Child and Youth Care task that accurately captures what it is that Child and Youth Care professionals do. The use of both language and examples which ring true for front-line workers is an essential part of my job. The teachers and writers whom I experienced as a new professional often didn’t articulate the role and I was left feeling that they wouldn’t last an hour in my job. Our job now as educators is to create learning that resonates with the experience of the Child and Youth Care professional and lets go of comfortable models from other disciplines that don’t accurately reflect what happens.

At the airport on the way home, I had a discussion with another colleague about what we are doing at Grant MacEwan College that is new. I thought it might be interesting to share this and get some comments back, so please let me know how this looks to you and share your plans with me.

We are using a solution-focussed model of practice and have been promoting this approach with both our students and the agencies in our area for the past five years or so. We have students learning about resiliency and developing competency through changing people’s story about self, a basic narrative approach. Moving away from a problem-based set of strategies about change was a powerful journey for us, and the students report great success with these new ways of thinking about what they are doing.

We have been using the relationship material that started in 1990 with Gerry Fewster’s work Being in Child Care, and continuing with Thom Garfat’s 1997 thesis and the CYC-NET relationship material starting in 2000.

Susan Leaf’s work described in her article Control to Connection and even Larry Brendtro’s relationship beachheads from The Other 23 Hours are all used regularly.

Our latest shift is into adapting adventure-based programming ideas into the life space and using brain gym, reiki, yoga and other physical movement approaches to create change. Physical activity and competence building through felt experience are our focus for future course content.

We have begun an arrangement with Malaspina University/College in Nanaimo, BC to offer the bachelors degree in Child and Youth Care on site in Edmonton, through our faculty. The first cohort of 18 students has started in September and we are very excited about finally having a Child and Youth Care degree program in Alberta. It has also been very enriching for our faculty to work collaboratively with the faculty at Malaspina. The program at Malaspina is a good reflection of the Child and Youth Care field and, as is common in this work, we have found the faculty there to be open, willing to give us what they have, and hoping to learn from us as we work with them. I don’t believe that such collaboration and sharing is as easy in other parts of Academia.

Our goals are to continue to talk to people in the field, and to colleagues around the world. We have a student exchange program with a school in Holland and a faculty exchange with a school in Ireland, soon to include student exchanges.

Canadian educators are trying to create a national connection under the aegis of the Council of Canadian Child and Youth Care Associations to further the dialogue and connection.

That’s all for now, we welcome comments and suggestions.