El Salto reflections

Mark Krueger

The El Salto Discussions are designed to serve as a spring board for new discoveries in Child and Youth Care practice. Held at a retreat center on the side of El Salto Mountain in Northern New Mexico, experienced members of the field explore important questions related to the future of care work. Products include papers, ongoing conversations, projects, collaborations, and actions to support further professional development on behalf of children, youth and families. Energy for the discussions is defined by the Spanish word “salto,” which conveys the idea of “jumping” or “leaping” into the future with our ideas, concepts, and visions. Participants include professors, practitioners, and others with considerable experience in Child and Youth Care. Everyone comes at their own expense, an investment that most of us find well worth making.

This is the definition that guided the discussions of 14 experienced members of our field on 4/30-5/2 2010. Many of the people in attendance are familiar to CYC-Net online magazine readers: Karen VanderVen, Jack Phelan, Carol Stuart, Frank and Vicki Eckles, Hector Sapien, Doug Magnuson, Quinn Wilder, Andrew Schneider Munoz, Hans and Kathy Skott Myhre, Janet Wakefield, and me). As promised in an earlier column, following are my reflections on the event:

Kiaras and Hans discussing modernism, critical theory and postmodernism after the main discussion had completed and others had left the retreat room to go shopping or the hot springs near the Rio Grand Gorge. Listening in with my poet’s ear trying to capture what they were saying while flooded with dozens of images that helped me see youth work in a new light. Earlier all of us sitting on four couches in a square with the Sangre de Cristo mountains in the background trying to “leap forward” with words in a discussion that took on a wonderful, non stop life of its own, egos to the side in favor of a critical discourse that was at once both agreeable and confrontational in the best sense of the two words. Quantum physics as much of the discussion as art, music, postmodernism, modernism, politics, and care; new enlightened ways of thinking about how to teach the work and to think about lunch, basketball, and relational work and how it is replacing level and punitive systems of Child and Youth Care we all know to be so harmful.

Dreams supported with proposed actions for a new virtual and real university that would give youth workers around the globe access to the tremendous human resources in the room and beyond. A consensus that we had to reach out across and work with all groups that worked with youth. A long discussion introduced by Jack of how to ease the endless tensions between practice and theory, and the role of intent and other factors in moving beyond as we continue to be and become as a field: accreditation of education programs and certification of workers seen as major steps for the field and our future; dozens of examples of how it all works. A realistic conversation that took into account the struggles we faced, mistakes we made, and the successes we had had, all evolving in the interchange that showed the maturity of members of a field who did not need to market or promote itself without acknowledging where we had been, good and bad as we search for a moral praxis.

Youth workers relating: dinner together at Mexican Restaurants, a wine and cheese at the Vandeboom Fine Art Gallery, and an evening hosted by Mark and Suzanne at the straw bale house and Hogan studio. People walking up the road together continuing the conversation from breakfast in the little village, Arroyo Seco, just down the side of the mountain from the retreat center; pairs and triads of people, rhythmically engaged in these conversations and latter at night in guitar, harmonic play and blues singing on those same couches where a different kind of music took over, all together, connecting, discovering and empowering in their play and serious talk. It turned out to be a three day event that was just what it was meant to be, at least for me and according to responses from others, for them as well. Three days of relating, challenging, rethinking, and stoking our fires.