Listen to thisIn this column I have written at some length about youth and youth work in reflection. There is much we can learn from our youth and our Child and Youth Care experiences. Especially if we are present in our reflections with self awareness and an open mind similar to the way we try to be present in our interactions with youth.
In my own reflective work, I have been inspired by the work of philosophers, artists, poets, and writers. I find much confluence in their work with the work of leaders in our field such as Thom Garfat, Gerry Fewster, Jack Phelan, Janet Newbury, Karen VanderVen, Hans Skott-Myhre, Janet White, and many others. Each in their own way adds to the discussion about the interplay between being in the moment and learning more from the experience in reflection.
Recently, for example, after visiting my son in San Francisco, I browsed through a book of essays Visions of San Francisco by poet Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who explored the relationships among, self, meaning, and place. In his opening essay, My Intention, he wrote: “I am here. Those words contain all that can be said” In any case, my consolation lies not so much in the role I have been called on to play as in the great mosaic-like whole which is composed of the fragments of various people’s efforts, whether successful or not. I am here – and everyone is some “here – and the only thing we can do is try to communicate with one another.”
In a book Themes and Stories in Youth Work several youth workers and I wrote together earlier in this decade most of them had their own way of expressing something similar. They were “here,” I might now suggest, with youth in the moment in the daily living environment trying to communicate with one another.
In another essay, Where I Am, Milosz finds self in a contemporary society being changed by commerce and technology: The human imagination is spatial and it is constantly constructing an architectonic whole from landscapes remembered or imagined; it progresses from what is closest to what is farthest away, winding layers or strands around a single axis, which begins where the feet hit the ground.”
Thom Garfat wrote a few years ago in one of his editor’s notes for The Journal of Child and Youth Care (now Relational Child and Youth Care Practice): “Those footprints you see around you are on the border of your own reality not theirs (youth). Tread gently and with caution but do not be led by your fear. For in the territory of the children's reality, just where it borders with your own, lies the opportunity for change: for them and you.” More recently Garfat wrote in a chapter in the book, Standing on the Precipice: Inquiry into the Creative Potential of Child and Youth Care Work about the “in between,” or the space between self and other. The “here/there/where” relational work and human connections occur.
This monthly column is titled Moments with Youth because I think it is important to remember that youth work is primarily a process of human interaction in which we share the journey. Like many others I believe the present and future to advancing our knowledge base is in our ability to learn from youth, each other, and members of other disciplines as we try to describe and question the “what is” of our existential, developmental, experiential interactions with youth and families. And to do this we have to be here, there with youth in the spaces where development and relationships occur.
I see my arrival at this point as part of my development as a youth worker and professor. Early in my career I was more interested in writing about technique. I needed models and steps and acronyms to organize my thoughts. Now that I have the techniques I am more content with the chaos of thought, soul searching, and questioning that seems to lead to new epiphanies about the work, or as I have often said the simplicity on the other side of complexity that shows me how to improve the way I listen, or move, or have lunch with youth in moments of connection, discovery and empowerment we share.
In our Child and Youth Care class we are reading Jack Phelan's chapter, Building Developmental Capacities in Standing on the Precipice. In the abstract he describes the challenge beautifully when he suggests, “Many Child and Youth Care strategies are focused on creating responsible behavior not responsible people".
The process focus relational/developmental emphasis seems even more relevant and important today when so many people are still focused on outcome rather than the process oriented, relational, and developmental approaches the field is advocating. For example, a few weeks ago I attended a community meeting where one of the topics discussed was youth involvement in decision making. The adults were suggesting that they could get a grant if we involved youth on advisory committees and in developing civic engagement projects with specific outcomes that would improve the community. I like the idea of involving youth in decision making when it is used to engage youth with us in making decisions about what we will do and how we will interact on a daily basis in projects and activities.
Too often, however, it seems the adults set youth up as decision makers to pursue civic, therapeutic, or developmental outcomes without acknowledging the youth are not necessarily always experts on their own experiences. Adolescence is full of paradox, soul searching, self questioning, and experimenting. Youth are “here” or “there” to experience and show self but not necessarily experts on making decisions about their future development or the societies in which they live. That’s what makes it such a rich period of life, the not knowing but wanting to know “the curiosity, experimentation, and uncertain/certainty that goes with being young and old. If we want to know youth and what they are thinking so we can make decisions together, then we have to be with them in the natural environments and speak across the spaces of our experiences. Their agency is in being who they are in the moment not in their ability to be prophets of their own futures. Their prophecy in other words is here with us now if we take the time to see and hear it.
My opinion of course is biased by my experience of youth and youth work. I shudder to think about how much of an expert I was on my own youth when I was a youth now that I have seen it in hindsight. Like most youth, sometimes, in moments of epiphany and insight, I thought I knew everything, and other times in moments of confusion and nothingness, I felt like I knew nothing. The trouble I got into was as valuable a learning experience as the success I had. I knew the least of course about the future because I hadn’t been there with the hindsight I now have.
Most of the youth I worked with needed a better understanding of themselves in the present before they could even imagine themselves in a future. This is not to say they did not have dreams of the way things could be, but rather they first needed to experience these dreams with others who sincerely wanted to know them as they began to know themselves.
It could be that I am a hopeless romantic trapped in the vision of the youth and youth work that is still part of me, changing and enriching itself in hindsight. This summer I heard W.S. read his poem Youth on the Bill Moyer Public Television show. I was so moved that I went out and bought his book The Shadow of Sirius. His “youth” is the youth I want to know.
Youth by W.S. Merwin
Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for
or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I
have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me
as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let
me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I
began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already
part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
