South African Child and Youth Care locked up? Pity!

A thought for talk in this blog-site raised a response on Face Book. It had to do with where child and youth care belongs - in Social Work or in Psychology.  She made it clear she believed it is a field of study, a discipline in its own right and should be in a Department of Child and Youth Care. When a School of Child and Youth Care was suggested, she liked the idea, saying "then we would be educated in our own vocabulary. We would be able to tell of the things we hear said to us every day".

"What we hear said to us every day" in South Africa and what we say and do when we hear it, suggests that there may well be a distinctly South African set of situations and a South African child care language, a South African vocabulary of experience and practice out there... in both our residential facilities and our community based settings

The Isibindi model  is a prime example of a unique South African approach to community based child and youth care work. But there is equally something unique about our Youth Centres and Treatment Centres . Unique models must surely be developing a richness of their own concepts, language and practice which can meld or should be melded into what we can call  distinctly "South African Child and Youth Care worthy of recording and study.... a contribution to the rest of the child care world.

We use African languages in our every day practice and that in itself must mean that there are concepts, nuances of meaning an focuses different from Europe and America.

One of the characteristics of a profession is that it has its own body of knowledge. It cannot be that our knowledge base, here in Africa, is limited by what we learn or get from Europe and North America. We do have a wealth of  knowledge here.

Good practice implies sound theory ( and visa versa ) Seems that we must even have unarticulated South African theories of child development and intervention underpinning our practice.

But where is this body of South African Child and Youth Care knowledge? Where are these theories?

Hidden in our practice? Locked away in what we hear, say and do every day?

Another characteristic of a profession is that it has its own body of literature. It means that if we are responding to to the African world view of the children in our care. If our children's inner and outer African experiences shape our individualised interventions in what can then only be a distinctly African way - then we have to hear about it.... the world has to hear about it.

Our South African stories, our South African knowledge has to be shared, researched, published.