The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
Listening diagnostically?The experience of our predecessors in the field is fragmentally recorded for us in their books, articles and teachings, and we, in turn add to this from our own experiences and the ways in which we share these and discuss them with each other. Thus we build for ourselves an amalgam which we might describe as our current understanding of Child and Youth Care work – and, seldom enough, researchers will add a little fibre to the mix.
In reality it’s more individual than that, for each of us will have (to borrow the metaphor from Oakley) our own personal collage of Child and Youth Care theory and practice. And it is true that we need this accumulation of knowledge, for it gives us some categories to understand what we’re dealing with and what are some of the possibilities for intervention. Together with our teams we get to recognise certain clusters of issues and behaviours so that we are not constantly reinventing the wheel.
But we are best advised to keep that theory and interpretive activity in the background, even unconscious, when we are directly engaging with young people and their families. If we try to do a sort of egg-dance amongst the minutiae of an encounter (classifying, recording, scrutinising, interpreting) then we are at best listening with only half an ear. We are listening and analysing at the same time. Listening diagnostically. In our meetings with clients we are failing to meet them. In our listening we are not really listening. We are not hearing. They are not being heard. They are not feeling heard. And we are limiting our resources to what we already think we know – not remaining open to the possibilities offered by what we don’t yet know.
In our practice today we remember that we seek to understand our clients, to discern the meanings which they attach to people, events and situations, to ascertain the feelings which lie behind their words and actions – and to do all this we must trust our selves, our presence, our senses – full time. So often we say that kids are ‘looking for attention’. We must give them all our attention.
Reference
Oakley, M. (2001) The Collage of God. London: Darton, Longman & Todd.
