Jerry Beker—2000: A Life-Space Odyssey Jim Anglin and Sibylle Artz University of Victoria

It has been almost 30 years since our friend and colleague Jerry founded the Child Care Quarterly, now the Child and Youth Care Forum. While neither of us has known Jerry for that long a time, we were both initiated into this profession knowing of his authoritative and influential role. We decided to reminisce together about our experiences of Jerry and his contributions to the field of child and youth care. Sibylle: Jim:

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When did you first meet Jerry? I believe it was at the first Trieschman conference in Boston, in 1985. But I really first met Jerry in the pages of the Child Care Quarterly. I remember to this day some of his editorials and the moral quality of his messages. One almost felt that he was talking to you personally about your work and the struggles each of us was facing on a daily basis. In fact, the journal began shortly after I began in my first child and youth care job, and to look back at the early issues brings back strong memories. I can’t really member how I first heard of Jerry, except he was a presence in the School of Child and Youth Care when I came here. In my first year as a faculty member, somebody suggested I should get to know Jerry Beker’s work, and along with that came the suggestion to submit something to CYC Forum. And so I did that and, of course, immediately got a response from Jerry, who then carefully worked with me to help me publish my first article in the Forum, and he was most encouraging. That then led into being invited to be a special issue editor, and the relationship quickly grew into a very strong one, both as colleagues and friends. We exchanged many e-mails, but it was probably three years before I met Jerry for the first time. What really stood out for me about

Correspondence should be directed to Dr. James P. Anglin, School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 1700, Victoria, BC, Canada V8W 2Y2. Child & Youth Care Forum, 29(3), June 2000  2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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him was the sense that what mattered to him was the importance of the theoretical and philosophical assumptions of child and youth care, and his strong commitment to keeping thought and theory alive. He pushed always on the thinking. And yes, he has certainly encouraged practitioners to write and to do research and he has always asked all of us, whether we are practitioners, academics, or researchers, for that matter, to examine what we think we’re up to when we’re thinking about, talking about, writing about, and working with children and youth. That reminds me that Jerry was a reviewer for my tenure file in 1984 and that he took the initiative to contact me, to say that he hadn’t been aware of my work before, and encouraged me to publish in the journal. From that point on, he took me under his wing, so to speak. He became a mentor and, very quickly, a friend. Yes! Quite open-heartedly. When you say open-heartedly, I think of some of my best times with Jerry that have been over meals in various cities, usually at his instigation, with Emily. Emily was a founding editorial assistant of the journal, so she has been involved for 30 years alongside Jerry in this work. I think Emily has been a pillar of this journal as well as for Jerry. And that’s been my experience of Emily, not only in relation to this journal, but having been in conversations with Jerry, where Emily was present. She is a woman of few words, but when she speaks, she speaks with such clarity and she speaks to the most important aspect of the conversation. She does that about what is being talked about, but she also does that about the relationship that is part of the conversation. I want it said that Emily Beker’s work is also being acknowledged here. I know that Jerry has mentored many people in his thirty years as editor of CYC Forum, but he has also mentored the field itself. What comes through very clearly in his intellectual work is that he has never succumbed to the notion that it is acceptable to reduce practice to a well-rehearsed set of skills that can be taught over a very short period of time to people who are then sent off to do the work. For example, in his Youth Studies course outline that he gave to me to help me to prepare to teach that course, a course that has become the basis for a graduate course here at the University of Victoria, it was very clear that he expected everyone, whether a student happened to be in their first year, their fourth year, or in graduate school, he expected everyone to think. He respected

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students enough to simply expect it, not to shepherd it along, not to introduce conceptual and analytic work slowly, but right in his course outline, to lay out that expectation. I really value that. And I think that that has been at the very heart of the journal. I think he has worked harder than anyone I know to encourage child and youth care practitioners to recognize their expertise and to share that with others directly through writing. He has been consistent since day one with this message. The first time I actually met Jerry in person, we spent a day together that was at least an 8-hour long conversation, during which we spent time in his car, in his office, and he also took the time to show me some of the sights in Minneapolis. It was possible to spend 8 hours in conversation with one person because of the deep commitment he has to excellence in child and youth care. What happened to me in talking with Jerry was that I rediscovered my own enthusiasms, my own passions for the work, because he talked about children and youth in a way that meant something to me. Yes, and I too can think of a number of 2- to 3-hour conversations when the time just flew by. The thing with Jerry is that most of the time he has an agenda of things he wants to cover with you, but of course it ends up going way beyond that. He never seems to visit without a purpose, and maybe it’s because purpose is always there. It is to push the profession forward; “How can I work with this person to help the profession” was the feeling I had. I am a person, but I am also a person who he expected to move the profession forward. He enlists us! Yes, exactly! We are friends with a purpose, friends with a mission. One of the things that happened as we were driving along, or walking along, or sitting together talking, was experiencing with him a shared sense of values about children and families in trouble not being pieces that we move along on a chess board but people that we solidly engage with and have faith in. That way of understanding people who need help is so often missing in much of the literature that speaks about children that are having difficulties, because their pathologies are being emphasized. We didn’t once speak about pathologies. Jerry’s way of talking about the subject is so entirely respectful. I find that inspiring. That is why I look to Jerry as a leader. As you were talking, I was thinking that Jerry relates to a

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huge range of people. Our field has a very diverse set of characters, in all senses of the word. And Jerry seems to have a very strong relationship with every single one of them. It doesn’t seem to matter what role you play. Some of our students have met him at conferences and he is just the same with them. The other thing that struck me when I first saw Jerry was that I didn’t realize it was him, because I was looking around for an older man and here was this man sitting there with his cap on watching me, and I was thinking, “Why is this man watching me?” And then I figured out it was Jerry. It’s because he looks so much younger . . . I was thinking about Jerry’s voice in child and youth care and the fact that maybe we don’t appreciate enough his theoretical contributions. My recollection is that most of the time, his contribution was through editorials. He always had the first word in each issue, or the summary word, and I’m not sure if Jerry has written many articles that were not co-authored. There is one that comes to my mind, “Development of a professional identity for the child care worker” (Beker, 1975), and I think that’s one of things that Jerry has worked on very hard is supporting child and youth care workers to maintain a sense of self within their practice. One could connect that work to his editorial voice. Such a voice is an acknowledged expression of self in voice. When Jerry spoke as an editor, as he has for so many years, it was in the first person. It was his voice we heard, him we engaged. Through sharing his personal vision he was continuously advancing work on the conceptual foundations in child and youth care. It is through that conceptual work and his support of others who think in similar ways that we have an alternative to locating the issues only in the child and the family. I think that has been a very important contribution over the years, because there were some decades when the emphasis—particularly in child psychology—moved far too much in the direction of seeing everything as intrinsic to the child, and it took us a while to get ourselves out of that and not to send children back into the very same context that had actually helped to produce their behaviors. He always talked about that. That’s part of Jerry as visionary. I think he’s always had a sense of how the profession could grow in its diversity, and I think the first symbolic thing I picked up from Jerry was the conviction that day care and residential care needed to be seen as a whole, that people who work directly with chil-

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dren have a common mission, and that’s what should unite people rather than where they work. He goes deeper. Jerry has always been pragmatic as well as theoretical. Why would you want to separate these things? From a pragmatic point of view, it gives us a much larger group and a much larger voice for children. Secondly, it makes eminent sense to have us develop a common theoretical basis, because he believed that it was essentially the same kind of work, front-line work with children, wherever the setting. And he’s stuck with that for 30 years. Well yes. Jerry Beker and Reuven Feuerstein, in 1990, wrote an article about the modifying environment in group care. In that article they write about self and work in a way that neither psychologizes nor romanticizes. They state, “It is widely recognized in the human services that the worker is not only an agent who brings appropriate resources to the student, but also and often more importantly, a model and a party to the interactions designed to lead to modification and growth.” They understand that the work is about change and go on to say, “Metaphorically, the worker is not just a sightseer or even a tour guide with the student, but one of the sights as well” (p. 29). Beautifully put! Very nicely put! So, it matters who you are, not just what you do. And it is also important that we recognize that we’re being seen in what we do and how we are being with people. It’s not just that we need to be aware of our own lenses and our own perspectives; we need to understand that we are always a part of a reciprocal process in which we are actually seen in action and recognized for who we are and what we do. That doesn’t often get said. I want to hang onto these kinds of deeper understandings of the work that a child and youth care worker does with other people. So Jerry has been, perhaps, under-appreciated for his own theoretical contributions. People tend to think of Jerry as the editor and the mentor. And as the person who helped them, which he does. What he has always been doing is good child and youth care work. And he has always been able to put into words what that means. That’s why I admire him and respect him. When I talked earlier about his moral voice, I think people pick that up very quickly, whether you’ve read his editorials or not. He’s a deeply moral person in the sense that “human being” is important, and that links with who you are as a

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worker; that is probably your most important influence on the child. Part of that is thinking clearly—he doesn’t ignore the thinking part, which many tend to do in our field. I just looked at another article that Jerry co-wrote with Mike Baizerman in 1982, “Professionalization in Child and Youth Care,” in which they reference, among other things, Michael Polanyi’s (1966) tacit knowing, which is the ground upon which reflective practice stands. It would seem that Jerry’s thinking is connected to the guiding principles of reflective practice, and he has worked to keep these principles alive at a time when much of North America gravitated towards sophisticated and often not so very sophisticated applications of behaviorist approaches. And still does, that’s what I was thinking too. Thirty years on, many of the projects that he initiated—the ways of thinking—still are unfinished and still have a long way to go. Yes, and that may partly be due to the fact that it’s very difficult to test, to measure the operationalized effects of an approach that is grounded in modifying an environment and in insight and in metaphor and in learning and reflection. It’s extremely difficult to prove, especially with quantitative methods, that there has been any kind of change, because it’s difficult to design quantitative tools, other than certain kinds of outcome measures, to get at what might be happening with someone in the kind of program we’re talking about. It’s much easier to evaluate programs based on cognitive behaviorism and operant conditioning, and so all the literature suggests that these are the most effective approaches (cf. Hyman, 1997). So perhaps one of the reasons the number of training programs has remained so small, especially in the higher academic institutions, is that this work is not seen to be scientifically adequate for an academic environment, so it tends to be treated in non-academic environments. And that’s one of the things we’ve struggled with here at the University of Victoria is to make it into a legitimate academic discipline, and Jerry’s been struggling with that for 30 years. We’re in better shape now than maybe we were thirty years ago and particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s, when all human services were trying to prove that they were grounded scientifically, and science was taken to mean statistical analysis based in rigorous quantitative methods and replication that was grounded in generalizations that depended upon probability theory. But we’ve moved along since then; we’ve

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moved into an era in which we recognize that with certain human service work that approach hasn’t made as much difference as we had hoped. We have been able to effect certain behavioral changes, but these haven’t always lasted. So now we’re looking at other methodologies based in a different kind of veracity, different kind of replication, and different research questions, and it may very well be time to revisit these programs and try to understand them in a different way. The advent of recent thinking in “human science,” freeing us from some of those positivistic, statistically-oriented, measurement-grounded approaches may allow for some of the wisdom and learning of child and youth care practice to be understood in a new way. And that is partly what Jerry has been challenging us to do; articulate it, write it down, share it, critique it, challenge it. The other thing I appreciate was that Jerry often had articles and rejoinders, critiques and commentaries. He seemed to really enjoy the debate of ideas, not just “publish and take it as truth.” In fact we do need to challenge each other and to challenge our ideas. I can remember many issues of the journal in which he called for reactions and comments on things that were published. He was trying to stimulate people to react, to take others on in the pursuit of a better answer or in pursuit of a deeper way of knowing, not to one-up each other, the way some traditional academic journals do. If I am only working from the null hypothesis, if my best test for truth is “How close to being not effective is this idea I’m working on,” then what can I really say to a group of children or a family that I’m working with? What do I really know about what is going on for the people I’m working with or for myself? I see Jerry as someone who always urges further refinement, deeper questioning. The time I really got to know Jerry was when I was editing a book for him. I just remember the pure excitement in the notes that Jerry would send back at what he saw as good and careful editing. I learned a lot about the editing craft from Jerry, with Jerry watching over my shoulder! He values good ideas, well presented. And craft was his model for good child and youth care as well. Right! With Jerry, he always gently suggests other ways of shaping ideas and makes suggestions without insisting that you shift your ideas. A very gentle way. Isn’t that exactly what we are trying to teach our students,

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exactly what we are trying to teach them to do with other people? Exactly! I think that as we talk, it is very clear that Jerry lives child and youth care practice through all of his roles. At lunch and dinner, driving his car, and the visit to the office. I haven’t seen Jerry’s office. Tell me about Jerry’s office! It was an experience for me! . . . an archive. His office is a physical symbol of Jerry taking care of the field. Any document and through those documents anyone who has anything to do with child and youth care can be found there. He is the pre-eminent networker. He does that with people, with references, with ideas. He’s always thinking about connections—very relational. Again, that fits with the fact that he lives care work. With Jerry there is something timeless. There is something very cosmopolitan about Jerry, a respect for intellectual work that breaks down all barriers. His respect for the word and for the text has a kind of rabbinical edge to it. It’s probably not an accident that Jerry is Jewish and that he is the way he is. That is part of who he is, and part of what he brings to the field is the care, the humor, the intellectual rigor, the embracing of life . . . the wholeness of it all—striving for wholeness. Jerry’s career in this field closely parallels the history of the profession in North America. It would be wonderful if he could be persuaded to reflect back over his career, almost with a chronology of important dates and events—a living history of this field. He’s been part of most of the significant events in this field, certainly for the past 30 years.

We end our dialogue about you, our dear friend and colleague Jerry, with the hope that you may be moved to respond to this festschrift with your reminiscences about the people and events in child and youth care that you have witnessed and participated in over your career. We treasure the knowledge, wisdom and personhood that you bring to the field and to us. Here’s to 2001 and your continuing CYC life-space odyssey! References Beker, J. (1975). Development of a professional identity for the child care worker. Child Welfare, LIV (6), 421–431. Beker, J., & Baizerman, M. (1982). Professionalization in child and youth care and the

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content of the work: Some new perspectives. Child and Youth Care Forum, 1 (1), 11–20. Beker, J., & Feuerstein, R. (1990). Conceptual foundations of the modifying environment in group care and treatment settings for children and youth. Child and Youth Care Forum, 4 (5), 23–33. Hyman, I. (1997). School discipline and school violence: Teacher variance approach. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.