The Ethnographer As Youth's Apprentice

Authors

  • Thomas Shaw Harvard Graduate School of Education, Human Development and Psychology

Abstract

Youth care professionals have a vested interest in understand­ing how young people construct meanings and responses to the world around them. Like anthropologists who try to understand life as "others" experience it, youth workers who allow themselves to enter youth's world of everyday practice and sense-making increase their chances of acquiring a valid understanding of youth's own perspectives. In this essay the point is made that youth care professionals, like anthropologists, must recognize their own professional blinders, and the fears and anxieties associated with experiencing the adolescent's (the "native's") point of view. "The youngsters had heard that suburb-bound commuters, from behind the tinted train windows, would shoot at them for trespassing on the tracks .... Some of the commuters had heard similar rumors about neighbor­hood children and worried that, like the cardboard lions in a carnival shooting gallery, they might be the target of talented snipers .... For both the boys and the commuters, the unknown was the enemy." ( from There Are No Children Here, p.7).

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Published

1996-03-01

How to Cite

Shaw, T. . (1996). The Ethnographer As Youth’s Apprentice. Journal of Child and Youth Care Work, 11, 61–71. Retrieved from https://acycpjournal.pitt.edu/ojs/jcycw/article/view/246

Issue

Vol. 11 (1996)

Section

Articles

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