Teaching CYC Practice and Power Dynamics

By: Jack Phelan

I have been writing about power and its implications for relational practice for a few columns now. I began with looking at direct practice and how an effective relational approach involves minimizing the power differences between the helper and the youth/family in order to support change (August, 2018). I then looked at CYC supervision and the ability to practice relational supervision, which is necessary at a professionally mature level of practice (October, 2018), and how it involves a reduction in authority and power dynamics. Now I want to explore the ability of effective teachers in post-secondary CYC programs to support CYC learning through using relational teaching strategies.

One of the clear limitations of classroom instruction is that it is an artificial and constructed environment, which is much different than the life space dynamics that are so important to deal with in actual practice. On the one hand, students get the opportunity to absorb fairly complex ideas in a safe and controlled environment, but this learning about CYC ideas absent the challenges inherent in life spaces can make the lessons ineffective. Mature practitioners often criticize the “Ivory Tower” learning of new graduates, since it rarely translates into skillful practice, at least immediately. In spite of this complication, because the actual ability to implement the skill of relational practice is still a future ability, it is essential to have a clear understanding and cognitive awareness of relational I December 2018 ISSN 1605-7406 35 practice concepts. The most effective way to teach relational practice would be after the student has been professionally engaged for about a year, but this is not practical. Trainers know that optimal learning occurs when the content of the training can be implemented immediately, which often is labelled “just in time learning”, and our post-secondary programs usually cannot expect this to occur, except with mature students who have prior experience in the field.

Given these serious limitations, it is still very useful to implement relational dynamics in the classroom so that students can get the experience of having a relational connection inside of an inherently power laden interaction. Teachers can become “experience arrangers” who demonstrate the actual practice that is still beyond the grasp of most of the students, but by having the experience, they will have a future goal that is tangible.

So we need to examine the power issues in our post-secondary institutions. Schools and classrooms are very hierarchical structures. Teachers are in a very powerful position with a great deal of external control. My personal experience December 2018 ISSN 1605-7406 36 the teacher and the class. Yet we also must deal with the structure of educational institutions, so we have to be cognizant of the many ways that we use power in our classrooms.

We have many procedures which exert external control, taking away the relational process from our interactions with students. Attendance policies, mandatory readings, pop quizzes and assignments in class that monitor ongoing homework habits, participation marks, and grading criteria all create external control rather than building relational learning capacity. We must examine our own beliefs about students, what do we believe about whether students really would put in the effort to learn if we did not control them?

Newer faculty need to develop through the stages of worrying about covering all the content and managing student behaviour in the classroom, so they will not be able to teach relationally right away, but after a few years they should be able to reduce their need for control.

The questions we need to address to become more relational in the classroom include; how can we reduce the power differential between us and the students, and between individual students and ourselves, and what are some relational approaches which are practiced in effective CYC work, which can be brought into the classroom? Teachers also need to demonstrate congruence between the ideas being presented and the physical reality experienced by the students. Relational practice is a complex dynamic generally demonstrated by skilled, mature practitioners and the people teaching CYC practice must first of all have been able to do this in their own experience as CYC practitioners, and then developed the instructional maturity to translate this into the inherently non-relational classroom.

If we are truly building relational practitioners in our CYC programs, this ability to teach relationally is an essential part of the learning.

Phelan, J. (2018, December). Teaching CYC Practice and Power Dynamics. CYC-Online E-journal of  the International Child and Youth Care Network, (238), 34-36.