Course description
This course provides students with an opportunity to consolidate and enhance child and youth care practice skills. Using current and emerging theory and practice, students will be supported in the application and development of skills in various settings. The primary focus of the course will be children, youth and families at risk.
Course content
The following global ideas guide the design and delivery of this course:
- Child and youth care practitioners work in and with a variety of systems. An understanding of various practice settings and the ability to collaborate with other systems is an essential aspect of CYC work.
- Stress and crisis are often major causal factors of increasing difficulties in the lives of children, youth and families. Effective response to stress and crisis by CYC practitioners can support children, youth and families to adapt to difficult circumstances, to seek additional support where necessary, and to discover effective means to cope and change.
- Children, youth and families and CYC practitioners have a diversity of: culture, religion, family structure, sexual orientation and socioeconomic conditions. Recognition of and response to diversity is central to effective working relationships between children, youth, families and workers.
- Assessment is essential to understanding and planning. Children, youth and families are collaborators in the assessment process
- The ability to participate in a collaborative planning process with the people with whom you are working is necessary.
- Competent CYC practitioners must be able to document their work. Documentation, while holding the practitioner accountable and contributing to continuity, also directly impacts the people with whom you are working. Documentation, reports and course assignments must always respect confidentiality and be mindful of the potential audience.
Learning activities
All methods of instruction apply to in class, hybrid and/or online modes of learning.
Means of assessment
This course will conform to Douglas College policy regarding the number and weighting of evaluations. Typical means of evaluation can include a combination of:
- Collaborative learning
- Research essays and reports
- Field research
- Participation
- Attendance
- Examinations
This is a letter-graded course. Students in the CYCC program are required to maintain a minimun grade of 60% (C) in all CYCC courses in order to progress in the program. Additionally, CYCC 1220 and CYCC 2432 will require a minimum grade of 65% (C+) in order to be applied as a pre-requisite.
Instructors may use a student’s record of attendance and/or level of active participation in a course as part of the student’s graded performance. Where this occurs, expectations and grade calculations regarding class attendance and participation must be clearly defined in the Instructor Course Outline.
Learning outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Identify youth at risk due to learning disabilities, ADHD and/or neuromotor difficulties, fetal alcohol syndrome, depression, street life, abuse, post traumatic stress disorder, family crisis, poverty, etc.
- Develop practice strategies to work with youth at risk
- Describe effective crisis resolution strategies
- Design inclusive practice strategies which responded effectively to diversity of: culture; religion; family structure; sexual orientation and socioeconomic conditions
- Discuss assessment from the perspective of the child, youth and family
- Apply the Circle of Courage (belonging, mastery, independence and generosity) in the discussion and design of practices for youth at risk
- Inform other practitioners, verbally and in writing, about a specific area of risk and discuss practice options
- Discuss and apply selected approaches to counselling children and youth at risk.
Textbook materials
Textbooks and materials are to be purchased by students. A list of required and textbooks and materials is provided for students at the beginning of the semester.