6-8 pages Child and Youth care — Mapping Community Assets

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Children and Youth Services Review 30 (2008) 717–726 www.elsevier.com/locate/childyouth

A pedagogical response to a changing world: Towards a globally-informed pedagogy for child and youth

care education and practice

Gerard Bellefeuille ⁎, Jenny McGrath, Donna Jamieson

Grant MaCewan College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Received 19 September 2007; received in revised form 26 October 2007; accepted 14 November 2007 Available online 3 December 2007

Abstract

This article poses a number of significant questions for discussion with colleagues, practitioners, and students to look at the pedagogical and ethical implications of a rapidly changing, increasingly diverse, technology-advanced, interconnected, and complex global society in regards to child and youth care education, practice, and research. While some professions flow well and readily adapt to the changing times, others remain locked in practices and traditional epistemologies created decades earlier. To remain relevant as a profession and to keep pace with the most contemporary issues of our times, a globally-informed pedagogy is proposed for child and youth care education that offers a more holistic approach to education and practice, is inclusive of people's diverse lived experiences, and is ethically responsive to the emerging complexities of an interconnected and ever-changing world. © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Child and youth care; Diversity; Education; Globalization; Pedagogy; Practice

1. Introduction

Once upon a time not too long ago the “family was considered irrelevant…to make this statement is not a

⁎ Cor E-m

0190-7 doi:10.

criticism…[rather] simply reflected the prevailing attitude of the times.” Thom Garfat

The millennium marks a moment of great responsibility because it is a point of departure to reflect and focus upon the challenges and opportunities available to the child and youth care profession in preparing the next generation of child and youth care practitioners. In the global millennium, child and youth care practitioners are confronted with a more complex, ever changing, technology-advanced, interconnected, and diverse world. The global trajectory our society has taken over the last few decades has dramatically altered the practice context of child and youth care work, calling into question not only what we teach but also how we teach our students.

Moreover, the impact of globalization on Canadian society has affected profound transformation in the lives of children, youth, and families. One of the greatest distortions noted has been the widening of the gap between those

responding author. Tel./fax: +1 250 960 6437. ail address: bellefeg@unbc.ca (G. Bellefeuille).

409/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1016/j.childyouth.2007.11.013

718 G. Bellefeuille et al. / Children and Youth Services Review 30 (2008) 717–726

who have everything under their feet and those who have nothing to stand on. The latest report card issued by Campaign 2000 (2006) revealed that since 1989, the number of poor children living in Canada has increased by 20%, as more than one million or one in six children live in poverty in Canada. Some of the resulting consequences of this growing economic divide include record number of families having to resort to food banks (Rideout, Riches, Ostry, Buckinghum, and MacRae, 2006) and a nationwide homelessness crises (Goldberg, Woodward, Kraus, and Graves, 2005; Farrell, Aubry, Klowdawsky, and Pettey, 2000). In many ways, this has contributed to the deepening repression of certain sub-groups of the general population—an outcome, which many believe has resulted in a number of negative consequences for children and youth including higher rates of suicide, illicit drugs and alcohol use, gang involvement, violence, and HIV/Aids (Boulos, Yan, Schanzer, Remis, and Archibald, 2006; Mellor, MacRae, Pauls, and Hornick, 2005; Public Health Agency of Canada, 1999). So it comes to as no surprise to hear that child and youth care workers are increasingly finding themselves in hostile, volatile, and unsupportive practice environments.

An even more significant impact of globalization has been a serious rethinking about the assumptions and values of public policy and their application (Banting, 1997; Canadian Council on Social Development, 2003; Kapstein, 2000; Saul, 2004). It is generally accepted that globalization undermines the ability of all governments to support spending on social programs (Bellefeuille, 2004; Contandriopoulos, 2000; Saul, 2004). Child and youth care operates within this context and therefore the impacts of the globalization of social policy on children, youth, and families simply cannot be ignored. We have an ethical responsibility to be aware of the impacts globalization is having on individuals and the profession of child and youth care.

As a service-oriented discipline, child and youth care needs to constantly evolve in its attempt to remain effective and ethically responsive to the rapidly changing times. We are a society that is being impacted by sweeping technological and social change that will continue. This cannot be denied. The ones most affected are our youth, as it is their future that is in question. We propose that the profession of child and youth care must seize the initiative to show the leadership and take the next step on the evolutionary ladder, instead of reacting ad hoc to the forces of globalization.

On that note, we raise several questions as to how the profession of child and youth care can produce the type of “ingenuity” that is required to effectively respond to the radically new complexities and complementarities of the human experience, and yet retain its distinct emphasis on “life-space” intervention with children, youth, and families. Questions that ask how should the child and youth care learning experience look and feel in a global context? What are the sources of knowledge and what knowledge do child and youth care workers need to advocate effectively for vulnerable children, youth, and families. Whose voices need hearing in the classroom? How can we envision child and youth care services that meet the diverse values and belief systems of a multi-cultural society?

In order to address these questions, keep pace and engage with the most contemporary issues, and remain relevant in an increasingly diverse society, a globally-informed pedagogy is proposed for child and youth care education that is more sustainable, holistic in worldview, inclusive of people's diverse lived experiences, and ethically responsive in linking ecological contexts with issues of social justice.

2. But first a word about the power of paradigms

As French philosopher Michel Foucault (1973) has taught us “knowledge is power and power is knowledge” (p. 387). Therefore, those who define the questions in effect define the parameters of the answers. As Karger (1983, p. 203) perceptively points out, it “is the parameters of the questions and the ensuing answers that function as the lens by which people view reality.” To move beyond the lenses through which we see the world, we need to be able to step back and to really listen outside of what we ‘know’ to be true, because by claiming the privilege of ‘knowing’, we often fail to see the limitations of our current worldview (Kuhn, 1962).With searching minds, we need to be unafraid to explore challenging philosophical ideas. It is only when we shift to this place of “INQUIRY” that we can start listening to one another again, have a chance to speak and feel heard.

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), arguably the most influential social constructionist book of the century, gave an analysis of how systems change or don't change. Kuhn put forth the suggestion that our propositions about the world are deeply embedded within paradigms. He maintained that, contrary to popular conception, typical scientists are not objective and independent thinkers; rather, they are conservative individuals who accept what they have been taught and apply their knowledge to solving the problems that their theories dictate. He

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argued that scientists tend to ignore research findings that might threaten the existing paradigm and trigger the development of a new and competing paradigm.

Child and youth care, like any other type of dominant idea, can be understood as a paradigm embedded within its institutionalized frameworks of theoretical concepts and practices. In describing the power of institutionalized frameworks to limit our collective ability to think outside of the existing paradigm, McGilly writes (1998):

1 The for the about t transfo

Members of a society operate within its institutional framework much as fishes swim in water—barely aware thatit is there, but unlikely to survive if pulled out of it. Our social institutions lead us to take for granted certain things as relevant, and certain things as good. It is important for the student of social affairs to challenge the conventional wisdom as to both relevance and goodness. Real understanding requires that one step back and take a careful look at the standards of right and wrong, of important and unimportant, that underpin the society in which one has grown up. Some will see the need for such change, some for little. What matters is that one exercise the responsibility to look critically. (p. 28)

It is therefore especially important that we engage in this discussion with a sense of our knowledge of the external world as suspect at best. A shift in paradigms routinely begins with a change in the level of consciousness. The foremost leader of consciousness-building as a process for critical social change is Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire, whose work in adult education has influenced people working in education, community development, community health, and many other fields around the world. An integral teaching of Freire's (1970) “critical pedagogy”1 that has particular significance to the discussion of paradigms is the issue of critical consciousness. Freire developed what he referred to as the practice of “conscientization,” which consisted of three stages of consciousness: intransitive consciousness, semi-transitive consciousness, and critical consciousness. According to Freire, one with intransitive consciousness sees life as irrevocably set in place, without human agency. A semi-transitive conscious person, on the other hand, has a worldview in which cause and effect operate in fragmented ways. The critically transitive or critically conscious individual sees the connections between individual problems and the social context within which they are embedded. Freire, like other critical theorists, calls upon us to see what is, to see the pos- sibilities of what could be, and to strive to create a way of life that is free, democratic, and just.

3. Locating child and youth care education within a global pedagogy

Drawing on the theory and practice of ‘seventh moment’ qualitative inquiry, which “asks that the social sciences and the humanities become sites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation–state, globalization, freedom, and community” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003, p. 3), we envision the following conceptual framework for building a globally-informed pedagogy for child and youth care that ensures a sustainable and socially equitable world for our children and youth, offers a more holistic approach to education and practice, is inclusive of people's diverse lived experiences, and is ethically responsive to the emerging complexities of an interconnected world. Such a framework would (a) more deeply engage students in the conceptual and cognitive processes of critical inquiry, (b) incorporate the dynamic use of information technology as a tool for learning, (c) emphasize higher order thinking skills, (d) offer a more cross-disciplinary and holistic view of practice, (e) foster ethical leadership, and (f) be inclusive and representative of the growing diversity in Canadian society.

4. Deeper commitment to critical inquiry

“Insight is more than the knowledge of this or that situation. It always involves an escape from something that

had deceived us and held us captive. In other words, the problem of inquiry is not always that we know too little about the subject we wish to investigate, but that we know too much.” Hans-Georg Gadamer

In its quest to establish a clear professional identity and legitimacy within the human services arena, child and youth care has embraced direct care practice, which is focused around direct personal involvement in the lives or ‘life-space’

Critical Pedagogy tradition has a very different starting point. It regards specific belief claims not primarily as propositions to be assessed ir truth content, but as parts of systems of belief and action that have aggregate effects within the power structures of society. It asks first hese systems of belief and action, who benefits? The primary preoccupation of Critical Pedagogy is with social injustice and how to rm inequitable, democratic, or oppressive institutions and social relations (Giroux and McLaren, 1994).

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of children, youth, and their families, as its most defining characteristic. A second defining characteristic of child and youth care would be its emphasis on the growth and development of children and youth across the life cycle. A third and related characteristic is the conscious use of relationship as a primary therapeutic tool. However, while the profession also ascribes to an ecological perspective, there exists a rather sharp fault line between the attention the curriculum places on the development of micro-level child-centered practice-based skills and macro-level critical thinking and problem-solving skills.

The ecological context of the family has changed significantly over the past few decades resulting in serious questions about whether the current scope of child and youth care education is providing students the vocabulary, critical reflective skills, knowledge, and ethical awareness to critically examine the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts within which contemporary practice is taking place. Child and youth care has within its terrain the theoretical based (ecological theory) and ethical foundation (social justice) to make their instruction more reflective of issues pertaining to diversity, vulnerable populations, and social justice. We're not suggesting for one moment that the current direct practice, life-space focus of the profession should be abandoned, but rather that it be taught within the emerging globalized ecological context.

Engaging students in the conceptual and cognitive processes of critical inquiry and reflection will generate in students the desire and ability to ask questions about relationships observed in society. This approach embraces the perspective that child and youth care education should have the twofold goal of advancing the individual and advancing society. In their interdisciplinary work on relational ethics, Carse and Nelson (1996) challenge us “to resist the human tendency to remain blind and unconcerned about what is unfamiliar or more relationally and personally distant and to develop a sensitivity to differences in perspective and need as a demand of justice” (p. 32). The importance of this message is that when inequalities are seen from the perspective of a commitment to social justice, they become ethical issues that a ‘caring’ profession has an obligation to address head on.

5. The dynamic use of information technology as a tool for learning

“School isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.” Richard Louv

2 Pro know a constru values,

The transforming impact of globalization necessitates a more active learning environment that will create a new, broader set of competencies to better enable graduates to cope with the complexity brought on by accelerated change and increased diversity in the world. These competencies include the ability to apply high level communication and problem-solving skills, to engage in critical systems thinking, to see from diverse perspectives, to demonstrate creativity and flexibility, to reason ethically, to work effectively in teams, to be able to create new knowledge, and to be lifelong learners.

In order to provide students with these competencies required to function in today's society, professional programs in higher education are examining the use of information technologies to support new teaching and learning models. These new technologies include but are not limited to, the Internet, video-conferencing, e-mail, blogs, instant messaging, social networking, adaptive hypermedia, specialist disciplinary software, learning management systems, and simulations. Used in conjunction with constructivist2 instructional designs, information technology provides students with a) greater scheduling flexibility, b)unlimited access to information in a variety of formats, c) respects diverse learning styles, d) supports students to become more autonomous and to take greater responsibility for their own learning, e) promotes higher order thinking and problem-solving skills by exposing students to different perspectives and interpretations that extend well beyond the classroom, school, and local community, and f) facilitates communication and collaborative learning by allowing dialogue and reflection to take place beyond the physical time and space constraints of the classroom walls—all conditions known to be optimal for constructivist learning (Abrams, 2005; Alavi, 1994; Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1993; Jonassen, Wilson, Wang, and Grabinger, 1993; Slotte and Tynjälä, 2005).

ponents of constructivist educational theory argue that humans ‘‘assemble’’ their own individualized versions of reality in an attempt to nd make sense of their world (Duffy and Jonassen, 1992; Ricks, 2002; Woolfolk, 1993). Because of this integration of prior learning, ctivist instructional design approaches promote a more open ended, cumulative learning experience. Differences in learning styles, personal and cultural variables can be flexibly accommodated while still staying true to the spirit of course learning outcomes.

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A powerful advantage of information technologies is that they allow for interaction in both synchronous and asynchronous modes. Synchronous web-communication tool such as text chat, audio-conferencing, video- conferencing, and whiteboards, which facilitate communication at the same time regardless of place provide students with the opportunity to work collaboratively on projects, receive peer support, and hold real-time conversation. Asynchronous web-communication, on the other hand, includes tools such as threaded discussion boards and listservs that engage students in any-time and any-place collaboration, providing them with freedom of time to participate when they choose, opportunities to review past comments, more time for reflection and to phrase responses, and opportunities for coaching discussions to take students ideas to the next level, to deeper, more critical, and reflective learning.

Despite the promise and growing evidence around the many benefits of information technologies in preparing students for the demands of a global world, there remains a level of resistance by some faculty who view these technologies as paradigmatically in opposition to humanistic, holistic, and client-focused care (Barnard and Sandelowski, 2001; Bellefeuille, 2003) or interpersonal interaction and critical learning experience that are required for learning effective reflective practice (Abell and Galinsky, 2002). It has been our personal experience that the computer serves as an effective facilitative medium to help students take charge of their learning. Students online interact with each other and the instructor as they do in conventional classrooms, and they have the added advantage of being able to interact with students and respected experts around the world through net links and access to distant databases. We're not suggesting that web-based technologies should replace face-to-face classroom-based learning, but rather used as an enhancement feature that offers different mediums and greater access—one cannot replace the other.

So, although teaching faculty may be talking self-reflection and critical learning, they may not be modeling self- reflection and critical learning. In order to expect creativity should we not also be expected to think critically and model creativity in our methods of teaching? To engage in continuous learning we must continuously unlearn past lessons and become ourselves anew, and this leaves us vulnerable (Langer, 1997). Perhaps this is our real challenge to recreate our learning environments.

6. Higher order thinking skills

“the imagination in its loyalty to possibility often takes the curved path rather than the linear way.” John

O'Donohue

The realities of today's global world are challenging the abilities of professional child and youth care workers in ways that were not foreseeable even a decade ago. It would be fair to say that we are charged with preparing students for professional child and youth care employment, yet we don't know what this world is going to look like even five years down the road. For creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson (2006) “schools often confuse academic ability with intelligence” (p. 7). For Robinson, it is much more important in today's world to help students to develop the capacity to think critically, creatively, and systemically.

Robinson (2006) gives a remarkable and entertaining talk at the online Technology Entertainment Design web-site asking “Are schools educating people out of their creativity?” He points out that the values of our educational system are tied to outdated ideas of service reaching back to the Industrial Revolution. Recounting a story about a famous ballerina, he tells us that the young woman, these days, would likely be diagnosed as having ADHD, as she didn't concentrate in her classes. Taken to see an educational specialist, the psychologist was smart enough to leave the room, turn on the radio, and let the young girl dance. He told her parents, “Jilien isn't sick—she's a dancer”. She went on to a dance school, joined the Royal Ballet and has choreographed most of Andrew Lloyd Weber's musicals. Nowadays, she would be given medication and told to calm down. So what kind of education curriculum and learning environment is needed?

For one thing, we cannot leave the teaching of critical, creative, and systemic thinking skills to chance. We need to see creativity within the important role it must play in preparing the child and youth care student for an uncertain and even more complex world of work, a world that will require child and youth care workers to utilize their creative as well as their analytical capacities.

We need to engage in and demonstrate meaningful discussions about the types of instructional approaches, strategies, and classroom environments that will develop these creative capacities.

According to Jackson (2006), the problem is not that creativity is absent in higher education studies but that it is taken for granted and subsumed within ‘analytic’ ways of thinking that dominate the academic culture. As a result, the

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enterprise of learning is generally seen as an individual objective activity rather than a “creative activity that combines, in imaginative ways, objective and more intuitive forms of thinking” (p. 3).

To overcome this tendency, we need to understand and explain creativity in the many different diverse contexts that make up child and youth care education as something that we all possess and which can be developed and nurtured. Studies by Jackson (2005a,b) reveal a number of features associated with the development of creativity. These include being imaginative (i.e., generating new ideas) and thinking out of the box; being original (i.e., the quality of newness); being inventive; being curious with an enquiring disposition (i.e., willing to explore, experiment and take risks); being resourceful (i.e., using your knowledge, capability, relationships, powers to persuade and influence); being able to combine, connect, and synthesize complex and incomplete data/situations/ideas/contexts in order to see the world freshly/differently to understand it better; being able to think critically, and: being able to represent ideas and communicate them to others (i.e., the capacity to explain something in lots of different ways so that it is meaningful to a listener, to create and tell stories, communicate ideas and show people possibilities, opportunities and solutions in ways that make sense to them and capture their imagination).

7. Cross-disciplinary and holistic view of practice

“No problem can be solved from the same level of thinking that created it.” Einstein

The challenges facing child and youth care practice in these turbulent times are enormous and elusive as they are for other professional disciplines. Social issues of poverty, oppression, youth violence, and other injustices elude any one profession. They require a much broader, integrative, and holistic approach which necessitates increased col- laboration, innovation, and communication across disciplines. Clearly, this will entail looking outward at the social, economic, and political forces that shape the human experience of the new millennium.

As we have been educated across different disciplines including educational psychology, nursing, social work, and child and youth care, we have come to value different and integrative perspectives that continue to challenge our inquiry into our teaching, research and human services practice. We instinctively know that we need better ways to understand and deal with the problems facing our world. That is not to say that disciplines do not have their proper sphere of inquiry; it is to say, however, that cross-disciplinary reflection is often fruitful and necessary. We also know that this effort will require some far-reaching transformations in the way we conceptualize child and youth care education. While we recognize the importance of building on past achievements, we also recognize the need for curriculum innovations in order to analyze our changing human condition and shape future child and youth care practice more effectively.

As the following lamppost parable suggest, the real innovations often lie off the road in the dark places where we don't want to go. For example, in the lamppost parable, late one night, Joe is on his way home from a meeting as he comes upon his friend, George, who is on his hands and knees in the street groping around under a lamppost. Joe stops and asks, “George, what's going on?” George says, “Joe, I have a big problem. I have lost my car keys. I live an hour away and I can't get home until I find them.” “Well,” says Joe, “I'd be happy to give you a hand.” They look under the lamppost for some time. They try a number of different approaches, but they can't find the keys. Finally, Joe says, “OK George. We're getting nowhere. Let's take a really radical approach. Where exactly were you when you dropped the keys?” George says, “I was about 150 yards up the road.” So, of course, Joe says “Then why are we looking here?” George replies, “Because this is where the light is so much better!”

More than ever, we need practitioners to experiment, deal with complexity, work across disciplines, confront issues with courage and heart, and work collaboratively within communities to create an environment that is safe for children, youth, and families. A cross-disciplinary and holistic approach to child and youth care implies something much deeper than the current system of isolated unconnected professionals that come together under the auspices of integrated case planning, yet all too often tend to identify with and practice within their individual professions. It implies “openness” towards others and a new way of learning and being together. A cross-disciplinary and holistic approach also resonates with much that has been written in recent times about the idea of learning communities and communities of practice. These movements are both about rebuilding the foundation for the society that has been fragmented by the combined forces of globalization of the economy and bureaucratization of all our major social, political, and educational institutions. The underlying principle that they share is how we learn determines the kind of society we build. The prevailing view in our society is that learning is something that individuals do. We often assume that learning has a

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beginning and an end, is best separated from the rest of our activities, and is the result of teaching. A learning communities approach asks how would communities look if we took a different approach? How would they look if learning is social and comes largely from our experience of participating in daily life?

In our collective life experiences, it's been and continues to be our engagement in collective learning experiences that brings us to a different place in our understanding of self and community. This of course is the fundamental assumption of social constructivism; that knowledge is built by learners as they build collective frameworks to make sense of their world. Knowledge, is therefore not universal and absolute, rather it is local and historically changing. We construct it and reconstruct it, time after time based upon our collective experiences in our life worlds. From this point of view, knowledge is not transferred in an authoritarian structure from government or service-oriented organization to community, but rather as something that local governments and service organizations and communities work interdependently to develop. This view fosters active learning over passive learning, cooperation over competition, community over isolation, and tentative knowledge over absolute knowledge.

8. Ethical leadership

We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted

rightly. Aristotle

A global approach to child and youth care practice goes well beyond introducing students to ethical codes, important as they are, but rather is grounded in ethical leadership, which seeks fundamental changes in society, such as the enhancement of individual liberty and the expression of justice of equality of opportunity. Consequently, we need to ensure that child and youth care students have the capacity to identify, discuss, and articulate the ethical aspects of practice so that they can better recognize the emergent ethical dilemmas that they will confront on the front lines.

Ethical leadership also requires a level of perception and sympathy towards the other that in our view is missing in ethical approaches that share the modern premises of universalism and liberal individualism (Lyon, 1994). Ethical codes based on universalism and liberal individualism can result in a view of practice as being a rather “rational” or “technical” matter (Abbott and Meerabeau, 1998). Divorced from the complexities and contingencies of real life experiences, this technicized view of practice, is being rejected by a growing number of practitioners and scholars seeking a return to Aristotelian-inspired virtues as being central to one's moral development (Thomas, 1996).

There is a presumption in ethical theories based on modernist thought that people will do what is right once they have a rational grasp of what is the right or wrong thing to do. Aristotle, however, dismissed the notion that knowing the good invariably leads to doing it. Volbrecht (2002, p. 107) writes; “To possess a virtue requires that one wants to act in certain ways and not simply that one does act in certain ways.” The moral question for virtue is, “What shall I be?” (Walton, 1986) rather than “What does the role demand?” (Klimek, 1990, p. 179). A morally sensitive worker would demonstrate awareness of the interactional dynamics of personal communications such as power differentials, gender issues, institutional coercion, prejudices, and self-interests which all play a role in the worker–client relationship.

Ethical leadership also places an emphasis on reflective practice and the capacity to self-evaluate. Through reflection the student begins the ongoing process of blending the art and science of ethical child and youth care practice. To conduct self-evaluation practice, one must use the best experience-based and evidence-based approaches to inform their practice. The former provides a retrospective look at current practice and questions the reason for doing so. The latter provides the means by which best evidence can be used to make foundationally sound and therapeutically relevant case planning decisions.

The reflective process requires time, practice, and an environment supportive to the development and organization of the reflection process. This is a highly individualized process and the child and youth care worker needs to create the structure and method of reflection that best suits him or her.

Within an ethical leadership approach to child and youth care education, students are not regarded as passive receivers of knowledge, and, similarly, teachers are not regarded as uncritical dispensers of a pre-established curriculum. Rather, teaching is about developing a relationship with the students in the life-space of the learning context—online or in the classroom, and reflecting on the implications of this relationship for students' learning. This focus leads to a curriculum that is empowering to both student and teacher. The development of curriculum based on these pedagogic principles will require acceptance from faculty and administrators who are willing to support creativity and unexpected learning.

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Developing curriculum in this manner would be an iterative process, so that the curriculum grows and adapts based on the changing contexts and needs of child and youth care workers. Establishing ethical leadership as a basis for professional practice will require that an ethical focus is at the center of every course.

9. Inclusive/representative of diversity

“There never were in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal

quality is diversity.” Michel Montaigne

Globalization has greatly increased the diversity and cultural make up of Canadian society. Toronto, for example, is one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world (United Nations Development Programme, 2004). The 2001 Canadian census indicates 42.8% of Toronto's population being of a visible minority and Statistics Canada (2005) projected that the visible minority proportion will comprise a majority in Toronto by 2012. Not only has it increased contacts between people, but has also increased contact between people's values, ideas and ways of life in un- precedented ways.

While for many people this emerging diversity is exciting, even empowering, for others it is disquieting and seen as a threat. Much of the fear of a loss of national identity and culture comes from the belief that cultural diversity inevitably leads to conflict or to weakening of social cohesion. This of course is a myth. It is not diversity that inescapably leads to conflict but rather the censorship of diversity on the basis of difference that can spark violence and tensions (Eliott and Fleras, 1992; Young, 2002). People may be fearful of diversity and its consequences, but it is opposition to diversity—as in the positions of anti-immigrant, anti-gay, and anti-Semitism groups that can polarize societies and that fuels social tensions.

Understanding diversity along the lines of equity, power relations, and institutional oppression, as opposed to culture, ethnicity and race is critical for the profession of child and youth care to remain relevant and accountable to the needs of children, youth, and families in a global society. To achieve this objective, we propose a series of strategies to enhance diversity competencies. These include creating program linkages across the community that reflect the diversity of its citizens (i.e., multi-stakeholder community advisory committees); establishing administrative and governance structures that reflect the voices of marginalized groups (i.e., youth on committees); advancing student and faculty recruitment strategies that target minorities; enhancing curricula that gives attention issues of diversity; and establishing field placement opportunities that reflect the diversity of the community.

10. Conclusion

Whether we like it or not, change is an inherent and fundamental characteristic of modern life. To this end, we who carry the torch for child and youth care education hold a particular responsibility to critically reflect upon the theoretical frameworks, values, and ideals upon which the child and youth care profession is grounded and how we might move forward using new approaches to education and training of child and youth care practitioners. With half of the millennium's first decade now past, our primary paradigm is still to judge every issue by asking the question, “Does this support our ‘unique’ professional identity?” If the answer is yes, then we embrace whatever it is.

We need to stop asking, “Will this make child and youth care unique?” Instead, we need to feel comfortable with our identity, look beyond our current realm, and start asking, “Will this improve the lives of children, youth, and families?” For that to happen, we need to see ourselves differently—identity and desire will have to shift. A globally-informed pedagogy for child and youth care would require child and youth care practitioners to have a more fully embedded sense of the global forces that impact the lives of children, youth, and families. It is a pedagogy that challenges all educators to reflect on and imagine the gap between the kind of education they aspire to and the preparation of the child and youth care practitioner that has a global perspective and readiness.

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