Youth Work is care

The work of keeping “kids in mind,” remaining attuned to their needs and perceptions even whenthey’re not present, echoes one of Lynch’s (2007) core practices of “love labour:”

Care based on a love of humanity, rather than maternal instincts.

Caring labor and intentional linking of “self and community” reflects a care philosophy rooted simultaneously in individual. 

Caring for relationships is a broader conception of community and justice.

↠The way Sarahs hair is cut is to represent gay community and they way she dresses but also opens up about herself to her students that provide them a perspective of the LGBTQ community that they may not receive in their home environment.

Care beyond the classroom. Michelle, buying weekly snacks is more than the physical effort, cash expenditure, or time it takes before school. 

↠ It is very much the invisible work of “feeding the family” that MarjorieDeVault (1994) describes—the planning, shopping, preparing of meals that go into raising children up. It is the effort of making school a “safe space” and a “second home,” effort comprised of all the countless large and tiny, often invisible, acts that mothers and motherers do to make a space feel cozy, predictable, provided-for, safe.

Care in terms of race, culture, social identity and survival.

 ↠ I cannot be a teacher without exposing who I am.” She connects cleaning to deeply held practices and roots as a Latina woman. She says that sometimes she “want(s) to break that stereotype of the female teacher—nurturing, keeping everything nice and clean,” but she cannot. Cleaning is part of where she comes from as a woman, a mother, Puertorriqueña, and as someone who also came up in neighborhoods where public investment in cleanliness and community were lacking.

Care within self

 ↠ Eli demonstrated his caring approach in work of seeing himself “through the eyes of students,” in his commitment to breaking through with hard-to-reach youth, in the great care he takes with his own practice and with supporting and mentoring other teachers.

It is physical, emotional, intellectual. It is compassion, presence, and curious care.