“Standing on the Precipice”

Reviewed by Mark Krueger*

Standing on the Precipice: Inquiry into the Creative Potential of Child and Youth Care Work. (2008). Edited by Gerard L. Bellefeuille and Frances Ricks

This is a biased review. I am friends with some of the authors and have learned from and enjoyed their work for many years. It might be said that the review is relational. As I read others, reflect on my experience, and interact with the material, these are my objective/subjective impressions:

Standing on the Precipice: Inquiry into the Creative Potential of Child and Youth Care, like many creative works (oeuvre), is a work in progress that captures development of our field at an important time. I am early in and already know I like and will be with this book for some time as I reread it. With chapters by some of the most creative and experienced writers in the field, Precipice shows (rather than tells) what we have and can become. The insights, ideas, images, and questions the work evokes ring true with Child and Youth Care as I know it to be, and subsequently I am having one epiphany after another.

The book is not just good creative, mindful thinking and writing but good learning of the type many of us search for in our classrooms with students. It is also best practice shown the way best practice can and should be shown with creativity, purpose, and ethics framed with questions and curiosity about where to go next. No foolish certainties to be found here, as novelist Milan Kundera said about the good novel. The authors, as one of the field's leading thinkers, Jerome Beker, urged us to do a few years ago, are trying to hear it deep and look for the questions that do so much to determine the soul of the work. They are also as another leader Henry Maier once said about good developmental care “in the thick of it.”

Shining through the multiple contexts and complexities and the constructing, modeling, and deconstructing that attempts to find and show “simplicity on the other side of complexity” is what I like to think of as the dance, or “lunch.” I can see relational work in the verbs, prepositions, actions, interactions and doing from my precipice as I reflect on Child and Youth Care unfolding in the lived experience. I can also see messy, nitty-gritty, every day nature of the work that makes it real, at least for me. I can’t wait to get it in the hands of students so I can hear how they see it from where they stand.

The book is divided into three parts: Part One: Crafting a Mindful Approach to Relational Practice, Part Two: Understanding Critical Aspects of Relational Practice and Part Three: Becoming Aware and Challenged by the Complexities of Relational Practice. There is so much here to see and think about (the anthology includes nine chapters by 11 authors, many of whom readers of Relational Child and Youth Care Practice will recognize. See Table of Contents at end of review).

The view is mostly postmodern, but it is also very practical. The takes, models, and dialogs show us meaning making, relating, and development in everyday contexts. If, like the authors, readers are nimble and creative, I am sure they will see and feel the Child and Youth Care they know in a new light that they can shine on their practice.

Perhaps what I like best about the book is that it locates Child and Youth Care in the writers” presence. They show up, and have become what they write about and write about what they have become, as another leading thinker Karen VanderVen encouraged us to do a few years ago in her writing about activity. Each author has his or her own voice and slant, but all are in search of the core of care in relational, contextual, inter subjective, developmental, gut wrenching, heart breaking, heartening, sad, joyful co-created Child and Youth Care.

At times, while reading it I get so excited that I work among these caring thinkers, I lose my place, and must read again to see where I am, and what I will find next. If you read this book with a similar mindset, I am sure you will make your own discoveries, and be better at what you do because of it. You will also have a better grasp of where the field has been, where it is and what it can be in eyes of those who see it with hope for the future. This is a brave book written in the spirit of a Child and Youth Care that always wants to be more for children, youth, and adults. Thus it is Child and Youth Care, and one of the most significant contributions to the development of our field in recent years.

I’m ordering it for our advanced youth work class next semester! You can get your copies from the Grant MacEwan college bookstore at: www.macewan.ca

Contributors and Chapters

Part One:

Part One: Crafting a Mindful Approach to Relational Practice

Thom Garfat: The Inter-personal In-Between: An Exploration of Relational Child and Youth Care Practice

Gerard Bellefeuille and Donna Jamieson: Relational-Centered Planning: A Return to Creative Potentials and Possibilities

Jack Phelan: Building Developmental Capacities: A Developmentally Responsible Approach to Child and Youth Care Intervention

Part Two:

Understanding Critical Aspects of Relational Practice

Jennifer White: The Knowing, Doing, and Being in Context: A Praxis-Oriented Approach to Child and Youth Care

Carol Stuart: Shaping the Rules: Child and Youth Care Boundaries in the Context of Relationahsip Banzai!

Mark Greenwald: The Virtuous Child and Youth Care Practitioner: Exploring Identity and Ethical Practice

Part Three:

Becoming Aware and Challenged by the Complexities of Relational Practice.

Tam Lundy: Presence and Participation: Being at the Heart of Change

Jennifer Charlesworth: Inquiry into Issues of Voice in Relational Practice

Marie Hoskins and Frances Ricks: Experiencing Differences: The Challenges, Opportunities and Cautions