YOST4196

This introduces students to the practice of youthwork and supports their professional development as a youth worker. The goal is to explore how we can become reflexive and critical practitioners. This is the required course for the Youth Studies major but is also open to students from other majors who want to explore the field of youthwork. Students can opt to pursue placement at a site already approved by the department or they can negotiate with the instructor to pursue an independent site. Using the University policy on undergraduate workload, the course hours are divided between seminar and in-site placement hours (requirements will not go beyond that of a typical 4 credit course).

The course requires students to participate in BOTH a weekly seminar and a supervised youthwork internship. The focus in the seminar is on integrating knowledge and youthwork skills for entry-level professional work with young people including topics such as professional ethics, identities and current issues in youthwork practice. The focus of the supervised fieldwork is on the experience of doing youthwork with real youth contextually and professionally teaches us about affecting change in the lives of young people.

The Youth Studies program takes an interdisciplinary approach to youth work and youth development. Students will integrate different ways of understanding youth into their direct practice. The program also focuses on human rights and social justice. This means accounting for and responding to the many ways discursive and institutional power operates to silence young people. This includes the ways in which power structures what opportunities are available to young people of different genders, sexual orientation, ethnicities, race, classes, geographical locations, etc. Our approach to understanding and responding to these issues is to attend to young people’s everyday lives and the idea of “youth-in-the-world.” The Youth Studies program expects students to be self-reflexive and engage in an analysis of power and privilege from a micro/personal perspective and a macro/ policy perspective. Students will begin to craft responses to lessening these structures on the young people’s everyday lived experiences.

prereq: Declaration of youth studies major, or instr consent

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