Listen to this
Any comment on CYC-Net, particularly of the celebratory kind, ought to rightfully start with a reference to two people: Brian Gannon and Thom Garfat. At a time when most of us were doubting the Internet, these two made a rather consequential decision to build a virtual network of child and youth care practitioners and scholars, students, and consumers, base it in South Africa, and use it to connect thousands of people all over the world. This is the kind of thing one comes up with after much consumption of alcohol (“garage wine” – ed), late at night, when the options are to tend to one’s headache and upset stomach or to dream up a transformative, profession-changing innovation. They chose to do the latter, and they almost certainly did that on the banks of that canal in the yard of the cozy house where Brian used to live just outside of Cape Town.
CYC-Online published its first issue in February 1999. The Editorial of that first issue, penned by Brian, is humble to say the least. It speaks to the importance of what CYCs do over where they work, refers to connections and relationships, and celebrates informality, although not as an alternative to formal research and writing, but as an enrichment and a contribution to accessibility. Then a few articles follow that mostly tell stories about CYCs and the young people they encounter. 300 issues later, we are still doing very much the same thing. The stories are not always about CYCs and young people; quite often, they are stories about systems, institutions, theories, concepts, research and ways of knowing, and sometimes even the politics of the day. Many of the stories are about the profession of child and youth care and reflect many different points of view. In more recent years, CYC-Online has featured continuity with many articles that celebrate the relational focus of child and youth care practice as well as very critical articles that explore some of the underlying issues of whiteness, racism, exclusion, and other themes. The authors of those articles range from university professors to practitioners, young people involved with CYCs in various settings, students in CYC programs around the world, and occasionally people commenting from outside of the field altogether. The geography of CYC-Online is expansive, covering all continents (except that really cold one). And, I think importantly, the age range of those writing for CYC-Online and those reading the articles is also quite expansive, which makes this one of very few vehicles for intergenerational engagement.
One of the things I find most interesting are the debates that have emerged, sometimes quite vigorously and at other times in more nuanced ways, about the value of the informal writing that is reflected in most CYC Online article contributions. Although there is a whole spectrum of opinion about this, there are at least two core positions one might identify (and I do dislike binaries, but here we go …). On the one hand, there are those who are concerned about this kind of informal writing, particularly when it is assigned as part of post-secondary CYC program reading requirements or used to facilitate discussion in real CYC settings. Those concerned argue that this kind of writing is incomplete, sometimes inaccurate, and based on little more than the opinion of the author. A respectable profession ought to focus on research-based writing, seek out evidence for its positions, and aim to elevate standards of knowledge and the praxis that flows from such knowledge. Post-secondary institutions ought to promote scholarly work that reflects the standards of academic integrity and diligence, and they ought to demand of students to engage such scholarly work and accurately assess its merits.
On the other hand, there are those who argue that much of the profession, and many of the students graduating from formal, post-secondary child and youth care programs, do not access formal, scholarly work (and often can’t access such work if it is not open access), have little interest in engaging that work, and as a result, end up doing their work based on the commands from institutional cultures, managers, and other disciplines that claim to know best. It is better to produce writing that at least encourages critical thinking and provides meaningful and accessible frameworks for discussing everyday practice than to keep pushing materials that no one cares about and few people read.
As an academic, I can see merit in both positions. I agree, of course, that scholarly work in our field (scarce as it is) is very important, and I am always interested in ensuring that the discussions in child and youth care practice settings are tied to some degree to systematically derived knowledge. It is far too easy to base practice on common knowledge that turns out to be little more than the nuanced ways in which some groups maintain their privileged positions over other groups. White supremacy, for example, has no research basis whatsoever and yet becomes reinforced constantly through informal and common knowledge claims that are deeply power-centered and political. On the other hand, I think scholarly work has its problems too. It is often disconnected from the lived experiences of people it claims to explore; it is itself subject to existing biases and exclusionary structures and processes that elevate particular ways of knowing over others. And scholarly work turns out to be fraught with problems from epistemological and methodological perspectives. We know, for example (as a result of scholarly work) that a great deal of research in youth-focused fields is undertaken on the basis of the lived experiences of specific groups of young people (often white, generally normatively conforming youth). But perhaps my greatest concern with the focus on scholarly work in our field is about how such work becomes translated into practice. I worry, for example, that current research on trauma and brain sciences has significantly displaced child and youth care relational approaches. The trauma label that has declared just about everyone as traumatized is impacting the way we are with young people at pivotal moments in their lives. I worry that child and youth care practitioners are using evidence-based practices that claim to be trauma-informed and are imposing such practices rather than negotiating ways of being with young people from moment to moment. Not long ago, our field was very much influenced by the scholarship of resilience, including questionable research from the SEARCH Institute that offered up 40 assets for building greater resilience in young people. In large part, I think this research was translated into practice through an ultra-conservative approach to reinforcing norms that perpetuate exclusions and dismissals of different ways of being. In short, I think we should pay attention to scholarly work as child and youth care students, teachers, and practitioners, but we should guard against its hegemonic control over what we do and how we are with others.
As someone closely connected to practitioners and to young people currently involved with practitioners, I also see the merits of informality and informal writing. For one thing, since almost all professional development opportunities offered to child and youth care practitioners are from outside of the field or pertain specifically to legal or procedural aspects of the field, there is very little opportunity for practitioners to engage materials that really reflect what they do or are asked to do every day. Informal writing offers ideas, ways of thinking differently, clues to what else might be possible. I think this kind of input is desperately needed, especially in settings that are so fundamentally based on routines and on doing things today the way we did them yesterday. Ideas are invaluable; it doesn’t really matter whether we agree with the ideas presented in various articles in CYC-Online. It matters only that we engage in those ideas, come up with our own, and have discussions (ideally with colleagues and young people) about why specific ideas are good or bad, workable or not.
Students in post-secondary education programs also benefit from exposure to ideas, even when these are not representative of research findings or evidence-based. Teachers at universities and colleges are fooling themselves when they think that the materials they teach from textbooks and research articles will somehow inform the practice those students will engage in once they graduate. What influences practice is not rigorous knowledge. It is the intangibles, the power dynamics, the peer influences, the organizational culture, and frankly, the personal biases of practitioners that will ultimately drive their practice. Knowledge, in the traditional sense, comes at the very end of a long list of other factors that are far more impactful. In short, as teachers, we are not that important when it comes to shaping how practitioners across settings are with young people. Let’s face it; all of us can point to students who have performed top of the class in the academic context but who we can’t imagine working with youth. And most of us have had students who struggled passing their courses, but we can vividly imagine them doing excellent child and youth care practice.
CYC-Online has delivered ideas. Sometimes, such ideas have been very practical. Henry Maier used to provide specific items practitioners should carry in their pockets when working with youth. Mark Krueger, especially in his earlier contributions, always used specific locations within the setting (the lunchroom, the program van) as sites for sharing ideas about how we might conduct ourselves around young people. For students and practitioners, these ideas take hold because they are relatable, and because they reflect something they are actually going to experience at work or in their field placements. From these ideas, they can derive new ways of practice, new ways of being, and new ways of responding to the needs and concerns of young people. Other authors have provided much more high-level ideas about the practice. Hans Skott-Myhre regularly treat us to moments when theory and practice intersect, and where possibilities for praxis emerge that are transformational if we are willing to question some of the foundations our original knowledge was built on. Other authors have made us think about equity, power, exclusion, and racism. Sometimes such contributions are high-level and not easily translated into the everyday experience of practitioners who don’t experience these things. Most of the time, however, these contributions are especially important for articulating the field of child and youth care in ways that it becomes recognisable to those who are in fact excluded, invalidated, or subjected to racism. These contributions, in recent years perhaps the most critically important ones on CYC-Online , have opened new conversations, changed what happens in team meetings, and definitely changed the conference programs of CYC conferences. I remember Jim Anglin presenting word clouds at a CYC conference just a few years ago showing how conference programs went from no mention of diversity, equity, racism, oppression and similar themes in the 1980s and into the 1990s to now being quite replete with these themes (it’s about time).
From my perspective, what makes a field exciting, innovative, and filled with possibility is when we engage one another on our core assumptions. The best thing that happens in our field is when a Wolfgang Vachon gets up and starts talking about improv; or a Heather Snell gives a keynote that is actually a performance rather than a speech. Even better than all of that is any CYC conference in South Africa, where the substantive content is fantastic but barely registers but the collective singing and dancing all the time creates a sense of community, purpose, and determination that no scholar has ever even come close to creating. (FYI: at one such conference, the Minister responsible for everything CYC started singing and dancing herself and ended up staying for the whole conference because she felt connected to something special; this never happens in North America or in Europe).
For me, CYC-Online is like a South African CYC conference. Certainly there is content and often things that really are intellectually and academically challenging. But much more than that, it offers ideas, ways of being, the unexpected, and sometimes combinations of humour, sadness, outrage, and trivia that cannot be found anywhere else, but that serves to remind us we do exist, we are community, and we can do better.
300 issues of CYC-Online , most of which were lovingly curated and edited by Brian Gannon, have made us better. I continue with my determination to be part of this innovation for as long as I can. And while I respect and acknowledge the concerns of my scholar friends, I remind everyone that neither scholars nor practitioners have solved the world’s problems, so perhaps it’s time to get over ourselves and just enjoy some good reading.
