More thoughts about place

Mark Krueger

I remember the weathered barn wood we hauled from the countryside to panel the living room in the treatment center to make it “homey” with walls on which we could also hang things with hammers and nails – things that were expressions of the kids who lived there. I also remember the small gym (rumpus room) with the eight foot basket (instead of the standard ten foot basket) that seemed just the right size for our one on one, two on two, and three on three games of hoops. And I remember the lakes, one after another that we portaged to and from, and the field behind the treatment center.

Youth workers in my classes and studies almost always include something significant about place in the sketches they write about their experiences with youth. The rumpus rooms and woods, and bedrooms and kitchens in their stories are part of what they hear, see, and remember. These happy and scary, pleasant and unpleasant, cluttered and neat places give a moment or story shape.

Place is both a physical and emotional phenomenon. We bring a sense of place to our surroundings, and both influence our behavior and actions. Youth is shaped in and with a sense of place – the street corners and playgrounds of our youth, the places that Herb Childress and Mike Baizerman wrote about where youth hang with a sense of anticipation.

Seamus Deans explained how James Joyce thought of Dublin in the introduction to Penguin Books' 1993 edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

"...a site of linguistic self-consciousness and a point on the map of the modern world that may only be a projection of our desire to give our knowledge a shape that is foreign to or other than it. Above all it is a place that is named."

Milwaukee is my Dublin, especially the part along the shore of Lake Michigan, the “Michigami” and linguistic self-consciousness I escaped to as a youth running from the American Pastoral to look at the ships on the horizon. The kids I worked with had their own “Dublins”, often dark places from which they wanted to escape for other reasons. Some had never even been as far as “the lake.” When I took them to “the lake” it was as if they had gone to the Atlantic Ocean.

Henry Maier wrote about the need for public and private spaces in group care. “The space we create controls us” he said. Jerome Bruner and others have written about how place plays a key role in determining how we build and shape our selves into the world. Most architects, artists, musicians, writers, actors, and directors of course get this.

In the last issue of CYC-Online Kiaras Gharabaghi wrote about a good place where staff focused on creating positive memories. Unfortunately, like many places, this place was closed because it did not comply with current policy and attitudes focused on output rather than input. In the same issue Karen VanderVen wrote about places that dehumanize children, sometimes unintentionally, with point systems, early bedtimes, and no touch policies.

As I write this, I am reading a wonderful manuscript by Hans and Kathleen Skott-Myhre that argues for a radical approach to ethics that is focused in part on Foucault’s notion of the care of self. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more places for kids were places with this sense of ethics, good places, places where, as one of my favorite poets George Oppen wrote about in his poem Of Being Numerous, we see ourselves in the things we live among, the places where we can get enmeshed again in the timelessness and space of youth again as described by Doug Magnuson and his colleagues in writings about the agency of youth.

We live in places, good/bad, happy/sad, and safe/unsafe places at times. This is the nature of things. Unfortunately the kids we work with have too often been in bad, sad, and unsafe places. One of our goals is change their sense of place by creating places where new meanings are made. Places that stimulate creativity, participation, and expression and at the same time make them feel safe “spaces or places without place", as Hans Skott Myhre writes in his excellent, thought-provoking new book, Youth and Subculture as Creative Force, which is receiving much of my attention this summer.

Students in my classes can usually tell shortly after they enter a group home, shelter, treatment center, or community organization if it is a good place for kids and families? The atmosphere is warm and welcoming, and the surroundings are filled with sounds, colors and objects that show that youth and staff live and relate here. People in these places do “things” together.

The Latino Community Center, where I am conducting an inquiry with five youth workers is a good place. When I visited there previously the students felt more or less at home, and energized by what they saw. The director, a former student of mine had turned it into a place that reflected the diversity, culture, and needs in the community of which it was a part. Sometimes we walked on the streets around the center and saw the other places from which the youth came and lived. The director recently left the center. Last week I went there to meet with the youth workers, and it seemed a little lonely without him.

No place is perfect, of course, but people in the programs where youth and family development is the focus make a sincere effort to make the place feel like an environment where participants and guests are welcome and encouraged to interact. Like most homes these places have good and bad parts that are often determined by the experience and meaning of place children and families bring with them. The difference is that they are always seeking to make as good a place as possible, a place where people can connect, discover, and feel empowered. The pictures on the wall, the tone and tempo and the smiles say lets learn and grow together. These are “customer friendly” places where what is being marketed and sold is a chance to relate, discover, and be with others. Positive memories are made in these places.

In his teachings and writings, Canadian Jack Phelan, who also writes for this online magazine, has this wonderful way of addressing youth workers and their development in places that are both good and bad at times. His goal, as he explained recently, is to help the workers understand how to make these good places as often as possible as they mature and learn from their mistakes. His classroom is a good place.

Every city, town, and country has its oppressive places run by the control, and sometimes religious “freaks,” who think of space and place mostly as a chance to restrict and shape personalities for a future as cold, closed, and limited as the place in which they find themselves. These controlling places try to make consumers, religious crusaders, and employees out of children instead of fulfilled and happy youth who have a chance to become their dreams. The workers and leaders live above, not “among” the children and families. The signs on their doors and walls have messages that “come down” from some mysterious higher authority. Presidents, preachers, gods, and captains from some place unfamiliar to anything democratic, spiritual, or humane.

These places in my opinion should be boarded up and nailed shut, just like the barracks that teach young men and women to kill. We should replace these places with “homes” – cabins, cottages, hang outs, playgrounds, and woodland and mountain temples of hope, and schools, after school, and group home programs that invite, inspire, value, and respect the creative and intellectual capacity of each young person to find his or her way with the guidance of a fulfilled adult.

My dream is for a contemporary civilian conservation corps of young people who would build these places with adults “habitats for humanity” across the land, not just the wood frame habitats, but the parks, streams, lakes, playgrounds, schools, and streets where everyone walked and played with their heads up. And we could easily pay for it with the money we have spent blowing up other places.

Maybe, just maybe, the mood is changing in the US, and there is more room for places where “the agency” is the youth and workers who “own” and shape it. Perhaps the progressive social attitudes people in Milwaukee and other cities once had about its parks and schools as community, rather than company, property are also on the rise again, and public utilities, parks, and schools will once again become public. Isn’t it nice to think this is all might be true, and we could create places such as this one where Camus, disillusioned with his country after the war, found self again?

“The day before yesterday, on the Forum – in the part that is badly ruined (close to the Coliseum), not in that extravagant flea market of pretentious columns found under Campidoglio – then on the admirable Palentine Hill where nothing exhausts the silence, the peace, the world always emerging and always perfect, I began to rediscover myself.

It is this that the great images of the past serve when nature can accommodate them extinguish the sound that lies dormant in them to gather the hearts and forces that will better serve the present and the future. It is felt on the Via Appia where even though I arrived at the end of the afternoon, I felt it inside me, while I was walking, a heart so full that life could have left me then. But I knew it would continue, that there is a force within me that moves forward" – Albert Camus Notebooks, 1951-1959, p. 121

In Child and Youth Care we can show the way by reminding ourselves to revisit the meaning of place. We can ask ourselves questions like does this place welcome, can the kids see themselves here, are they part of making and shaping it, do the rooms, doors, and windows open to others and close when needed for privacy? Is this a place where I would want to put my head on a pillow at night or come in off the streets? Is this a place that stimulates discovery, experimentation, and risk taking that can lead to healthy development and happiness? Is it a place where the lessons learned teach the value of hardship, hard work, stick-to-itiveness, dependability, predictability, unpredictability, experimentation, risk taking, engagement, community, belonging, and struggle that lead to connection, discovery, and empowerment rather than distance, more anger, and dissatisfaction?

We can also be advocates for shutting down the truly bad places. The places that deceive with control and false promises of outcomes aimed at turning youth into being adults without providing the opportunity to be in their youth with Child and Youth Care workers.

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Notes:

*For those readers who are not aware Albert Camus was a French journalist and Nobel Peace Prize winning novelist, who became disillusioned after WWII when the country he loved and had hoped would become a democratic bastion of freedom, invaded Algiers where he had worked and lived. According to his letters, he spent much of his life before he died in his forties in a car crash searching for meaning and place.

Much of my thinking this month was stimulated by conversations I had in New Mexico with my colleagues during the retreat I wrote about in this column in June.