Whats Under the Dirt?

Wondering as a Transformation of Self

Scott Kouri and Jeff Smith

Abstract: In this paper we introduce ontology as a form of wonder and creativity, or looked at another way, wonder as a form of ontology (journeys of thought and imagination which perpetually meet/create existence anew). Our aim is to inspire curiosity about what a philosophically oriented CYC might become when wonder and creativity are intensified in our relational encounters. This means asking questions rather than providing answers, exploring sounds or colours rather than teaching scales or spectrums, and allowing ourselves to be transformed by our connections with young people and the questions and observations they offer.

Whats under the dirt? Many of the questions we ask seek answers, but can we imagine questions that open onto other questions? Our hope with this article is to cultivate a curiosity uninterrupted by answers. We believe this would fit in our interactions with children and youth who are not satisfied by answers, but rather seem to prefer to wonder without end. We start from the premise that young people appreciate complexity and curiosity and venture that their questions dont always seek answers, but rather people to wonder with them. Furthermore, reflecting on our own experience, we share how philosophical engagement can inspire wonder and energize us to wander more freely. Imagine the following scenario: You are a facilitator at a camp when a child digs a hole in the earth and asks, Whats under the dirt? How would you respond? Would you explain that there is more dirt and groundwater beneath that? Or, would you engage in another way? The question whats under the dirt? belongs to a long philosophical tradition concerned with ontology: the study of what really exists or what existence is. While these questions are not usually overt in conversations about Child and Youth Care (CYC), or in conversations with young people, someone with an ear for philosophy may hear them echoing in the background. We ponder what this child might be
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wondering about. Is it the texture, colour, smell of the dirt? Is it the mystery of what is under, what lies beneath the surface of things? Or is it something this child was taught to ask, or something they heard asked before? In this paper we propose a form of wondering as a transformative event for both self and the young people we engage with. We acknowledge the rich Child and Youth Care tradition of using self in daily practice encounters (Fewster, 1990; Garfat, 2007; Ricks, 2003) and hope to extend this tradition by thinking about the possibilities of meeting young peoples curiosity with openness to personal transformation. We reflect on one of our own practice encounters and try to conceptualize how conversations may open up lives (both ours and the young persons) to new horizons. We aim to inspire new thinking in terms of how the self can be transformed when we allow ourselves to join with young people as they question the world around them.

Ontology Humanism and Post-structuralism

Does God exist? What about dragons, ghosts, atoms, colours, Hobbits, Santa Claus, magic, dinosaurs, bazookas, zombies, and others? Do they exist? These are ontological questions that are asked by young people. Ontology refers to the underlying beliefs about what
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exists in the world, what the basic stuff of existence is made of, and how things behave. Ontology informs our practices and relationships. St. Pierre (2000) writes about the dominant ontology of our time, humanism, which informs the language we speak, the designs of our homes, the ways that we practice our relationships, the politics we espouse, the maps that locate us on the earth, the futures that we conceive, and the limits of our pleasures. In our CYC work with children and youth our underlying beliefs about what or who an individual is, what change is, how it happens, and what kinds of things are possible when people get together, effects our experiences and relationships. If humanism provides the assumptions and certainties that we are all used to, post-structuralism provides the philosophic tools to question this ontology and open CYC up to a new vision of itself. Post-structuralism, generally conceived, is a critical response to the commonplace and taken for granted tenets of humanism in order to open up and call into question what we assume as most natural. St. Pierre (2000) articulates that both humanism and post-structuralism are incredibly nuanced and variable in composition, and, while boundaries between the two are often unclear, there are some important distinctions. Returning to our young friend digging in the dirt at the camp and asking us a question about what is under it; the

adherent of humanism might refer this child to the science teacher for the correct answer. The concepts (such as dirt) that are generated from this approach are thought to be objectively observable, relatively stable over time, and independent of historical contexts. The question about dirt might be answered in terms of its universal properties (carbon, nitrogen, etc). Extended into the human sciences, the humanistic approach based in rationality and scientific method seeks to describe individuals in terms of essences, universals, or stable identity categories. For example, a person might be a mother, an executive, a farmer and/or an artist, and it is assumed that it is clear enough what any of those mean. The aim of identifying the stable identity of individuals, however, is called into question when incompatible identity categories compete, for example, when women are removed from the category mother and placed into more problematic identity categories such as addict and prostitute. The disqualification of mother has life altering consequences such as when the categories addict or prostitute override the category mother and women go missing without a proper investigation. When a young person mentions, for example, their mother, what assumptions and associations come to mind? When a person talks about a drug addict or sex trade worker,

If humanism provides the assumptions and certainties that we are all used to, post-structuralism provides the philosophic tools to question this ontology and open CYC up to a new vision of itself.

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Had we answered this young persons question with factual information we might not have learned that the dirt he was talking about had this unexpected relation to his mother.

how often do we overlook their membership in other more socially acceptable categories? When we orient ourselves to people based solely on singular categories, we fail to recognize the complexity of life. Similarly, when words are taken at face value we miss the layered meanings and references that the other might be relating to. When a child asks whats under the dirt we cant assume we know what they are alluding to. To meet these questions on their own terms, we argue that post-structuralism allows for a sustained critique of our own reference points, exposing us as conversational partners to the complex and chaotic flux of life. Child: Whats under the dirt? Counsellor: This dirt? Child: No Counsellor: Oh, where is that dirt? Child: Its where they found my Mom We are struck by this statement and ponder: Who found his Mom, where? What was she doing in the dirt? Was she hiding? Did she die? Pass out? What should I ask this kid next? Post-structural philosophy marks a shift from a theory of language that understands words as representing real things or actual experiences in the world to a more critical reflection on how language acts to construct human experiences. Deleuze (1994), for example, articulates a philosophy that describes how change and difference outpace

our attempts at understanding and knowledge; while our words and concepts construct life in different ways. Deleuze writes of ontology as a creative process, one which can produce worlds and lives worth living. He pushes ontology to its limit, and in so doing finds the question of how one might live to be raised afresh and ready to offer surprising answers (May, 2005, p. 16). Our conversation about the dirt, from a post-structural perspective, can therefore become a consideration of something else. We would like to proceed gently with young people, always looking for how one might live, even in death. Had we answered this young persons question with factual information we might not have learned that the dirt he was talking about had this unexpected relation to his mother. With a disclosure such as this we set to wondering about where to go next. Counsellor: Your Mom? Child: Yeah, she was gone and then they found her but she is not coming back Counsellor: Can you tell me about your Mom? Child: She is a Sunwalker. Here weve practiced active listening and open-ended questioning to open spaces in-between self and other that can lead to a mutual transformation. What are this young persons understandings of life and death, lost and found? What are the pressures that our categorical language and thinking press upon us while

our curiosity meets with this young persons? What happens to people when they are no longer here or there? What is a Sunwalker? How can the dirt, the introduction of the Sunwalker, our current conversation, and this young persons experience create both our lives anew? The practice of wondering-with that we are proposing here is an active loosening up of the self and an engagement with the possible worlds that young peoples curiosity provides us with. Starting with a wholehearted acceptance of the reality of this young persons life-space, we slowly proceed to allow ourselves to become part of it, immersed by it, transformed by the entities and processes that govern its ontological structure. Wondering-with a young person, in this sense, is a radical joining through which we are co-created in the lived experience of connection. Who we are, our essential self, becomes more of a process than a stable entity: we join with young people, their environments, life-spaces, histories, and the dirt they walk on to an extent at which we are transformed and a becoming is initiated between us.

Wondering-with
What are you doing here? Whats your deal? Whats up with you? When a child asks: who are you or why are you here? we often bypass the complexity of our identities (our social,
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cultural, spiritual and historical dimensions) and respond with something like: Im a counsellor, I am here to help. This type of response, which is based upon a coherent and simplified identity, adheres to a requirement of including a professional statement of position and helping intention when entering into a relationship with a young person. However, we wonder, when these young people ask us about ourselves, are they really seeking to identify our job title and employer? Many of our connections, conversations, and relationships with young people are based upon establishing what is common and when difference is encountered, we attempt to establish knowledge and render the unfamiliar known. It seems natural for us to move towards knowing, providing answers, and claiming some kind of understanding in order to establish a comfortable relationship. Kant suggested that humans are categorical creatures that, as constructivist psychologist Mahoney (2005) articulated, use order to adapt to unique situations and make personal life changes. On the other side, however, Mahoney articulates the importance of disorder in the change process and emphasizes the need to stay with the discomfort of the unknown. As practitioners, we engage in innumerable moments where wonder moves us either toward knowing or further into the unknown.
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What if, instead of tracking identities and discussing things that we know (re-producing knowledge, identities, and practices: I am a counsellor here to help you make sense of your grief), we asked ourselves questions like: where is this dirt leading us and why? Wondering with this young person about the dirt, our bodies, and our mothers are here understood as the forces that produce me in the moment of interaction. Our individual selves are seen as products of the dirt, wonder, bodies, Sunwalkers, and mothers, rather than our selves being prior to the wondering about these things. We suggest that philosophical engagement (either in our own internal process, or overtly in our therapeutic conversations) opens new practice directions and transforms the proverbial positioning I know you into a perpetual process of what are we becoming? Becoming is a wondering-with, a process of becoming something other than what you were or who you thought you would be. This is not a becoming designed to annihilate histories, identities, or cultures, but rather a practice designed to undo calcified understandings. It is a project of making acquaintance with change, a process through which identity dissolves into difference. Counsellor: Are you OK if I ask you about Sunwalkers? Child: Well, who are you anyways? Counsellor: I am a coun-

sellor, have you ever spoken to a counsellor before? Child: Yeah, Ive spoken to a couple, its fine. Counsellor: I am wondering about the dirt and Sunwalkers. Child: Well I can tell you about some of that As our conversation continued, I employed questions informed by response-based practice (Richardson & Wade, 2010), which elicited stories about how the boy learned of his mothers death, how others (social worker, family, members of his community) responded to his confusion and grief, and how in turn he responded to these responses. Although this practice approach requires practice knowledge and professional identity, it was a temporary territory from which both of us could become something different. Our desire as practitioners for effective interventions, to help, to live up to our own ethics and values, are always overlapping intensities with the wonders and movements of the young. We wonder about how we, as practitioners, can operate within these intensive spaces where our desire to understand and do justice in the face of atrocity meet the wonder of the child entertaining death in his own way. Child: Well my Mom told me that when people die the earth takes us back to where we first came from Counsellor: And where is that? Child: The sun, we are all

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energy that comes from the sun

Sunshine Walked Beside Her

As a daily life event, wondering with children and youth is not merely a mechanism to facilitating learning, development, and understanding, but rather a catalyst for creativity and way of being that is created in every relationship. We ask ourselves how comfortable are we with difference, change, and being produced anew? How insistent we are on our identities, our knowledge, and the language, which guaranties their stable and knowable existence. What would it be like to be open to the productive capacities of a childs wonder? To become something new with them? We do not wish to downplay the value of understanding stable concepts and developing practice knowledge. Rather than a practice of fitting the world into theory we endeavor to change the world with theory: a CYC praxis. The post-structural use of a concept like dirt is improvisational. Like a jazz musician first embodies the time signature, melody, harmony, and feel of a piece of music before improvising, we can use concepts similarly to speak the common language and then do something new and unexpected. Quoting Skott-Myhre (2009): Our conversations should break apart and explode the myriad possibilities

inherent in each word, each turn of phrase. Conversations between youth and adults should explode and open lines of escape out of both the spaces and the content of each utterance (p. 131). Toward the end of our encounter the young man shared some fond memories of his Mom as a pretty darn good dancer who sang too. We concluded our interaction that day with a music lesson. The young man taught me the chorus of an obscure country song that his mother used to sing to him: The name she gave was Caroline Daughter of a miner Her ways were free It seemed to me That sunshine walked beside her

Ricks, F. (2003). Relatedness in relationships: Its about being. Relational Child and Youth Care Practice, 16(3), 70-77. Skott-Myhre, H.A. (2009). Youth and subculture as creative force: Creating new spaces for radical youth work. Toronto: University of Toronto. St. Pierre, E. A. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. Qualitative Studies in Education 13(5), 477-515.

Scott Kouri is a graduate student in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria. He is currently conducting research on CYC theories of self and identity. His practice base is in school based and wilderness youth counselling. Jeff Smith M.A. RCC, MTA works as a counsellor with Vancouver Island Health Authoritys Discovery Youth and Family Substance Use Services. He is also an accredited music therapist interested in improvisation, song-writing, and recording. His research interests include language analysis of therapeutic conversati ons and music therapy praxis with socio-economically oppressed communities.

References
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. (P. Patton, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968). Fewster, G. D. (1990). Being in child care: A journey into self. New York: Haworth Press. Garfat, T. (2007). My shelled self. Relational Child & Youth Care Practice, 20(3), 29. May, T. (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge. Richardson, C., & Wade, A. (2010). Islands of safety; Restoring dignity in violence prevention work with Indigenous families. First Peoples Child and Family Review, 5(1), 137-155.

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