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PART I
Philosophical Groundwork for Relationally Engaged Youth Work
But if theory is not the crystallized resin of experience, it ceases to be a guide to action.
Leslie Feinberg
I have to reflect and think about what I did, write it down, and ask āwhat drives that and what did it do?ā
Andrea, a youth worker
Do not skip this stuff. Please.
One of the challenges of our drive-through, Snapchat, 140-character culture is that we often jump into doing stuff without considering (1) what ideas are behind and beneath the doing, (2) where those ideas come from, and (3) what those ideas and the doing of them create, or result in.
In youth work practice, this often ends up manifesting in youth workers asking colleagues and supervisors to ājust tell me what to do.ā That approach is, by definition, unrelational and insufficient. At times, we all find ourselves desperately searching for the magic words that will help us turn a rough corner with a young person. There are, of course, no such words. Any magic emerges from the relationship and the interaction, not the speaking of silver-bullet words.
Furthermore, we are less likely to search for āwhat to doā when we are grounded in concepts and conversational resources that create genuine engagement, when we organize our work around a relational ethic, and when we maintain a reflexive practice in which we continually ask critical questions about our work. The chapters in Part I lay the foundation for all these activities. They also position ethics at the center of youth work.
We are always influenced by certain ways of understanding the world, whether we are aware of it or not, and whether or not we can articulate any of those ways. This is not bad, it is simply inevitable. The point is to be intentional about which philosophical stance you take and to stay reflexively engaged with what comes from that.
The first three chapters of this book invite you to take a particular stance when doing youth work. The concepts introduced in this part provide the conceptual framework for the specific practices provided in Parts II and III. This framework functions as your conversational compass for the relational paths of possibility you will travel with the young people you work with. Donāt head out without a working compass.
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1
WHERE YOU COMING FROM? A PHILOSOPHY FOR THE PRACTICE OF YOUTH WORK
The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself.
bell hooks
I went to talk with him and I didnāt have any idea where the conversation would go.
Quinn, a youth worker
Why do we need a philosophy or theory to inform our work? Canāt we just talk to youth?
When youth workers express this sentiment, or others like it, Iām reminded of the story about the fish that is asked how the water is. The fish responds, āWater? Whatās that?ā
Like the fish that has always knownāand only knownāa particular context and a certain way of being, we are often unaware that when we ājust talk,ā that talk comes from a particular philosophical frameworkāand that philosophy is reflected in our talk.
In fact, some philosophical/cultural framework always informs any social/ relational activity. Each framework puts forth ideas about how to be in the world. Itās impossible to ājust talkā without having the talking we doāour words, our assumptions, our intentions, our understanding of ourselves and those weāre talking toāreflect the assumptions and ideas of some philosophical framework. Because that philosophy is all around us and itās all weāve known, we just do it. (And often, like the fish, we have no conscious recognition of it.) These frameworks are societyās lenses through which we interpret the world. The realities that we take for granted are the realities in which we are immersed.
In contemporary North American culture, the guiding framework that informs many of our social activities is individualism1. Individualism leads to a certain kind of talk. Conversations within the framework of individualism are often thought of as transmitting information from one person to another, or as an exchange of information. Language is thought of as describing truths, and often we end up trying to convince others of The Truthāas we see it.
Within an individualist framework, social/relational complexities and context go largely overlooked in favor of a focus on what goes on āinsideā of individual persons. Our attention is given to what is oneās āauthentic self,ā what is āin their headsā or āin their hearts.ā With our interest solidly placed in this idea of interiority (that is, the stuff āinsideā of people), all our efforts to shape, change, inspire, or otherwise influence others are directed at peopleās āinsides.ā
Thatās not where Iām coming from. When I mentioned the idea of untraining in the introduction, I was referring to helping you get untrained from individualism.
Language as Action
Conversations should take youth to a new place.
Angela, a youth worker
The ideas and practices in this book are informed by social construction, a philosophical stance that is relational rather than individual. When we take a social constructionist stance, we understand language and what it does very differently than we do within the discourse2 of individualism. To begin with, social construction understands language not as descriptive, or as a means to convey undisputed facts about an assumed reality; rather, language is a relational process of making meaning.
For example, when I say, āIām sitting at my desk writing, looking out the window at the trees,ā what my language makes doesnāt stop at the description I offer. You are assigning meaning, and what you come up with may be very different from what Iām experiencing. As a result, your interpretationāand the significance you makeāof my words are likely to be very different than mine.
A lot depends on your relationship with trees, writing, desks, and sitting, as well as on the many cultural factors that influence you. What does sitting at my desk writing mean, if anything, in your experience and culture? What kinds of trees grow where you live? Is desk a term for a concept that represents something to you? What does my desk mean, and what sense of relationship or ownership do those words convey to you?
Even the temporal dimension of your experience shapes the meaning you make. Would you have assigned the same meaning or significance to that sentence last year? Will its meaning change for you over time?
There are also personal considerations that influence meaning. Have you had any especially important experiences involving trees, desks, or writing?
Thus, we shift from a visual metaphor, where language describes the observable, to a dialogic metaphor, in which language produces meaning. Language is productive, not merely descriptive or reflective. In social construction, this is known as discursive productionāthat is, the making of discourse.
Social Construction: From Noun to Verb
You may be familiar with the idea of social constructs. For example, itās common to hear that race and gender are social constructs. This means that the existence of race and gender are determined by the introduction, imposition, and acceptance of such concepts by culturally influential groups. There is nothing universal or natural about race or gender; their meanings change across time and place.3
But how does this happen? How do social constructs come to be? And if theyāre created in the social world, how do they have such real effects on people? That is the focus here: the process of social construction.
A helpful way to think about this is to shift from the static nouns of constructs to the dynamic verb of constructing. Thus, we are not only interested in any given construct and the meanings associated with it; we are also very much focused on how people participate in the process of socially constructing the meanings.
By acknowledging that language is productive rather than merely descriptive, we now see how notions of ātruthā and ārealityā begin to come unhinged: if you and I cannot assume the same understanding of desk, tree, writing, or sitting, there is little room to claim universal agreement on what is true and real. In this way, social construction is skeptical of universal truths applied to all people, regardless of the context. (Universal truths are a hallmark of modernist discourse, the worldview of individualism.) This skepticism comes to life through questioning what we know, as well as of how we came to know it, and whom such knowledge might benefit. This process of questioning is known as deconstruction (Derrida, 1967, 1977).
Instead of a singular, ostensibly objective view of reality, social construction views reality as multiple, subjective, and historically and culturally contingent. This view of language shifts the emphasis from individualism and from language as a representation of a singular reality, to a set of social activities shared between and among people who partner as agents of the production of multiple realities (Wittgenstein, 1953).
What does this mean in youth work? For one, it means that we have to work very hard to understand and attend to young peopleās meanings as they share their experiences. (We will go more deeply into listening for understanding, meaning making, and validating meaning in later chapters.) It also means that we need to be self-reflexive: we may need to interrupt ourselves when we (wittingly or unwittingly) impose our meanings, or those of the prevailing culture and discourses, on young people.
This process of exposing and deconstructing discursive assumptions is central to constructionist philosophy and narrative practice. These assumptions, which reflect the dominant discourses (and which are often organized around ideas of what is āright,ā āappropriate,ā or ānormalā), serve to colonize youth into dominant or normative ways of being. They also close off untold other ways of making meaning and taking action in the world.
Understanding that language does things also means that a whole world of possibilities opens up when we enter collaborative conversations with young people. Because meaning is always on the way (McNamee, personal communication), the productive potential of language can be leveraged through generative conversations with young people.
One other critical principle of social construction is that all this meaning making isnāt happening āin your headā in a completely individualistic process. Instead, meaning making is a social process through which people negotiate meaning together.4 So, even if youāre up in your head envisioning desks, trees, and writing right now, the experiences youāve had with those things, and the meanings youāve established for them, came from the social world. They havenāt been in your brain since birth, nor did they ādevelopā there because youāre a certain age. And, right now, because you and I are considering all of this together, weāre negotiating meaning in the social world via this book.
Making Me from the Outside In: Implications for Identity
Youth work is identity work.
Marjaan, a youth worker
Youth work concerns itself a great deal with young peopleās identity development. Indeed, helping youth ādevelopā is an implicit, and often explicit, intention of all youth work.
However, when we take a constructionist stance and accept that meaning is relationally produced, we must reject another firmly held assumption of individualism: the idea of the self-contained individual. This assumption holds that a personās identity is determined by their essence, what is supposedly inside of them. This essential self is understood to be fixed and stable.
The pervasiveness of essentialist notions of identity is readily visible in the use of clichƩs such as authentic se...
