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2 JULY 2010
NO 1597
Family workers
Family workers perceive, interpret, and deal with life experiences within family practice that is shaped by their internal maps of reality or what they think is true about reality.
The intemal map is based on paradigms or mental models (Senge, l995) that shape thoughts, feelings, and actions. Kuhn (l962) notes that every time something is beyond the boundaries of personal paradigms or maps, it is not possible to see the opportunities that lie beyond. This point is demonstrated in the following folklore:
A man was speeding down a dusty and twisty country road in his fancy red sports car. It was a sunny and bright day. He had the top down on his car and was singing out loud while feeling on top of the world. As he approached a bend in the road, out of nowhere came another car driven by a woman weaving from one lane to the other. He managed to avoid smashing into her and to his surprise, as she passed, she yelled at him, "pig." He was startled and yelled back at her "stupid woman!" as she sped down the road and out of sight. He was enraged and thought, "How dare she! She called me a pig! She was the one driving all over the road!" He collected himself, breathed deeply, straightened his hat, and sped off at full speed down the road. Around the comer he smashed right into the pig.
In this story the man thought he knew that the woman was calling him a pig; therefore, it was outside his knowing to consider that she might be alerting him to the danger of running into a pig around the comer. It is our premise that ethical practice is construed and driven by the importance placed on having requisite knowledge within a particular practice culture because such knowledge is supposed to inform what ethical practice is and how to conduct it. We argue that knowing sometimes prevents family workers from being open to exploring the complexity of ethics within family work; hence knowing is a critical barrier to co-creating ethics and living them within family work. Further we argue, ethical practice that relies totally on professional codes of ethics and standards of practice have been based on the "knowing" paradigm and can be impediments to ethical and moral reasoning within the practice context. Such codes can lull practitioners to sleep in matters that require critical reflection and discretionary judgment with regard to families and communities. Finn (1994) explains it this way: "Ethics which rely on the (political) categories of established thought and/or seeks to solidify or cement them . . . into institutionalized rights and freedoms, rules and regulations, and principles of practice . . . is not so much an ethic as an abdication of ethics for politics under another description" (p. 101).
Doing away with knowledge, rules and codes is not a solution. Rather, we challenge the reader to be alert to the limitations of rule-based formulations in family work as an attempt to deal with the unknown. We encourage family workers to be open to inquiry and ongoing leaming as a means to creating an ethical inquiry that prompts discovery and learning within the family.
FRANCES RICKS AND GERRARD BELLEFEUILLE
Ricks, F. and Bellefeuille, G. (2003). Knowing: The
critical error of ethics in family work. In Garfat, T. (Ed.). A
Child and Youth Care Approach to Working with Families. New York.
The Haworth Press. pp. 118-119.
REFERENCES
Finn, G. (1994). The space between ethics and politics: Or more of the same? In L. Godway and G. Finn (Eds.) Who is this "We"? Absence of community. Montreal. Black Rose Books Ltd.
Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, Ill. University of Chicago Press.
