INDEX OF QUOTES
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A story draws people in because it rings true with their experience, even if the experience is in another culture or country. The stories in this Journal, for example, resonate with the experiences of workers around the globe. Many readers probably turn to the stories first, as I do, because the stories speak to them the way an article might not. Time. From stories, I also learned that events occur in the context of past, present, and future, and not always in that order. Sometimes moments in child and youth care, for example, move forward and back through stories. A youth feels connected to a worker and recalls it later with fondness. Or a youth struggles with a worker then later understands what the worker was trying to say. Motion, I’ve learned from stories, is a major theme in child and youth care. Workers move through a day with youth, acting and reacting. Sometimes, I think of motion as an existential hum or rumbling that is just beneath the surface of my experience. It is there just beyond my grasp, waiting for me to understand what it means. Aristotle’s description of motion as the mode in which the future belongs to the present also fascinates me. More often than not when I was fully engaged in the moment, I was moving with youth. We were running or playing or working together lost in our activity. Place is significant in the stories of child and youth care. Things happen in child and youth care in places that influence the way these things happen. A room or a park or street, for example, is an important part of a moment of connection, discovery or empowerment. Place is also part of a young person. Young people, like workers, come from places and these places are part of them. The challenge is to name and know these places. To understand, call and mark a place as something that is part of us in the past, present, and future and to be sensitive to how the places we are in might or might not be familiar. Why are young people in certain places and how do these places influence them and what they do? I am always asking myself as a construct a story. I have been excited lately by the work of practitioners and scholars who have used story and themes such as time, motion and place in developing a way of thinking that might be called postmodern child and youth care work. These people see child and youth care work as a complex process of interaction in which things are constantly changing and evolving. No two situations or individuals in this world of child and youth care work are the same. Further, every child and adult has a unique and constantly changing story that is shaped by his or her cultural and familial experiences. |
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