Where Care Learned to Speak

In conversation with Dr. Marie Hoskins, we revisit the making of Child and Youth Care and consider relational practice, teaching, scholarship, and the ethic of care that continues to shape how the field understands itself. Dr. Marie L. Hoskins is Professor Emerita in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, where she devoted her academic career to teaching, research, mentorship, and the advancement of knowledge in child and youth care.

Dr. Hoskins holds a BA from the University of British Columbia and an MEd and PhD from the University of Victoria. Her scholarly work has focused specifically on adolescent girls’ development, identity formation, disordered eating, family relationships, and the ways in which cultural and social narratives influence how young people understand themselves. Her research has drawn extensively on qualitative and interpretive approaches to understanding human change and experience.

Throughout her career, Dr. Hoskins was deeply committed to teaching and to supporting the next generation of practitioners and researchers. She supervised numerous graduate students and involved students in her research, encouraging them to develop their own interests and perspectives. In recognition of her teaching, UVic highlighted her enthusiasm for learning, and her ability to create a creative and stimulating learning environment in which students felt motivated and inspired.

Her professional interests also extended beyond the university. Dr. Hoskins was a member of the Taos Institute, an international organization devoted to multidisciplinary practices in a variety of settings.  Another international initiative addressed the experiences of children and young people affected by armed conflict, where she was part of a team led by Lt-General (Rt) Romeo Dallaire. 

Dr. Hoskins’ career at the University of Victoria reflects a lasting commitment to understanding the experiences of children, youth, and families, while nurturing thoughtful, compassionate, and critically engaged professionals and researchers. More than anything else, this was her passion and the highlight of her career.  She is now retired from the university and holds the title of Professor Emerita.

In this episode, I speak with Penny Stephenson, one of the first graduates of UVic's Child Care Program, about finding her way into a field that was itself still taking shape. Penny reflects on the interdisciplinary education that informed her practice, her early work at Cedar Lodge, and the changes she witnessed across decades of supporting children and young people.

Our conversation moves through questions of inclusion, advocacy, experiential learning, and what it means to remain open to learning throughout a career. Woven throughout is a reminder that care is ultimately relational and shaped by the connections we build with young people, families, colleagues, and one another.

After graduating in 1974, Penny worked at Cedar Lodge, a residential neurological center in British Columbia. She initially worked as an evening care worker for a year and then moved into the school program where she spent another five years. She stopped working, briefly, to have her two sons and then in 1986, she started on call at the Cowichan School District, where she worked for 30 plus years, until retiring.

What happens when the conversations we have keep echoing long after they end? In this Pondering Pause episode, I reflect on some of the questions that have been following me through the first half of the season, such as who do we read? Who gets to be seen as a child and youth care practitioner or scholar? What happens when we make room for ways of knowing, being, and practicing that sit outside dominant conversations? And what does it mean to show up, as human beings and practitioners, in difficult and uncertain times? 

I find myself thinking about the scholars I encountered and those I missed, about migration, spirituality, Indignity, culture, and ways care is shaped by the worlds we bring with us, about the edges of the fireld and who finds themselves there, and about provocations such as "it's not the time to be timid". The last idea, in particular, leaves me wondering about courage, privilege, and what we might be willing to risk in order to speak, act, and care differently. 

I don't have answers to these questions. In fact, one of the things this podcast continues to remind me is just how much I still have to hear, learn, and grapple with. For now, I'm interesting in staying with the questions and noticing how they might shift my own understanding of my place within child and youth care. 

Dr. Martin Brokenleg, an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, has dedicated his career to bridging Indigenous and Eurocentric ways of caring and supporting children and youth. He is co-author of the book Reclaiming Youth at Risk: Our Hope for the Future and co-developer of the Circle of Courage model. Over the past 30 years, he has co-hosted an annual conference, Reclaiming Youth Seminars.

Dr. Brokenleg holds a doctorate in psychology and is a graduate of the Anglican Divinity School. Most recently, he was Director of Native Ministries and Professor of First Nations Theology at the Vancouver School of Theology. Previously, he was a Professor of Native American studies at Augustana University of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He has also been a director of The Neighborhood Youth Corps, chaplain in a correctional setting, and has extensive experience as an alcohol counsellor. Dr. Brokenleg has consulted and led training programs throughout North America, New Zealand, Europe, Australia, and South Africa.

Hans Skott-Myhre worked with unhoused youth in a variety of settings for 25 years. For the last 25 years, he has been a Professor at Brock University in Child and Youth Studies until 2015 and is currently in the Social Work and Human Services Department at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Youth Subcultures as Creative Force: Creating New Spaces for Radical Youth Work, co-author of Habitus of the Hood, co-editor of With Children and Youth and Youth work, Early Education and Psychology: Liminal Encounters, as well as co-editor of Art as Revolt: Thinking Politics Through Immanent Aesthetics and Troubling Multiculturalism. He is also the author of Post-Capitalist Subjectivity in Literature and Anti-Psychiatry: Reconceptualizing the Self Beyond Capitalism and the co-author of Desettlering as Re-subjectification of the Settler Subject. Most recently he is the co-author of Health and Human Services: A Critical Approach to Theory and Practice slated for publication in fall of 2026. He is a deep thinker and has published multiple articles, reviews and book chapters.

Thom Garfat, PhD, has worked with young people, families and those who work with them for over 50 years. He holds an MA in Clinical Psychology and his PhD is in Child and Youth Care. He is a member of the Order of Canada, recognized for his “pioneering work in helping troubled children and their families.” Since beginning as a Child Care Worker, Dr. Garfat has supervised residential and community-based programs for young people and families, taught child and youth care practice and family work at the University of Victoria and Ryerson University, and been the Director of Treatment for a large youth serving agency. He is currently an international consultant and trainer for foster care, family care, kinship care, program development and residential care in South Africa, the USA, Ireland, Scotland, Canada and other countries.  

He is the author of ‘Part of the Circle’, a Plan of Action for revising Youth Healing Services in the Cree Nation of Northern Quebec and has developed Action Plans for youth services for the Provinces of PEI and Nova Scotia. Dr. Garfat is the co-founder and editor of the International Child & Youth Care Network and the Canadian journal Relational Child & Youth Care Practice. He is the author of numerous professional articles and books and was a Senior Trainer for the Circle of Courage. Thom is also the developer of the training, The Purposeful Use of Daily Life Events, which is used worldwide. 

Through his company, TransformAction, Dr. Garfat offers consultation, training and keynote addresses around the world. His primary focus is on ‘making it work’; finding practical everyday ways to enhance the process of healing and development for young people and families. 

I return to a conversation with Dr. James Anglin, who, as you might know now, was one of the folks who helped encourage and provoke this podcast. Reflecting on the first few episodes and having completed various other interviews, I was left wondering about the context of the evolution of Child and Youth Care, as a profession, from Dr. Anglin's perspective. 

In the episode, Dr. Anglin shares insights into the origin of the word "profession", connects Child and Youth Care to spirituality, offers insights into the first Child and Youth Care training programs in Canada, and provides an overview of the theorists, philosophers, and practitioners that have left a mark on his own practice and scholarship. 

Check out Season 1: Episode 2, to learn more about Dr. Anglin's personal journey through Child and Youth Care, including his work in government(s), mental health facilities, as a group care provider, and later as a researcher with a focus on residential care. 

In this episode, I stop and link together thoughts that have come up as I have engaged in conversations with scholars and practitioners. These initial conversations have provoked feelings, curiosities, and reflections, not only of my own but also of my peers, colleagues, and friends. 

What I've quickly come to realize is that I am hopeful that folks who listen to these conversation do so with a willingness to hear the stories as they are spoken by particular people from particular spaces, and perhaps in spaces of learning, growth, and development such as our CYC classrooms, where the conversations can be contextualized. The one thing I am cautious about is to think about listening from a gentle, respectful, curious unknowing perspective and then to sit and listen again and again and again. 

In 1992, after working for 22 years in the field of Child and Youth Care, Dr. Sibylle Artz became a professor in the School of Child and Youth Care. She engaged in participatory, collaborative, and inter- and cross-disciplinary research for more than 30 years, with a focus on gender, culture, class, and community. To that end, she worked for many years with her colleagues, Dr. Ted Riecken and Dr. Diana Nicholson, both from the University of Victoria, and with her European colleague, Dr. Wassilis Kassis, Head of Department at FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, to learn more about violence resilience and pathways that lead away from violence engagement. 

Dr. Artz is the founding co-editor with Dr. Jennifer White of the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies,where they worked to foster and support the dissemination of multicultural and multinational knowledge about children, youth, families and their communities and the challenges they face, and in finding ways to ensure that not only English speaking, predominantly white, North American perspectives receive attention. She has many accolades, including the 1998 Confederation of University Faculty Associations of British Columbia’s Academic of the Year Award, selected as a Vancouver Sun’s Special Millennium Feature as one of British Columbia’s 50 most important current intellectuals in 2000, the McCreary Youth Foundation Award of Distinction for Research in 2004, and in 2008, when she was awarded the Victoria Leadership Award.

Professor Emeritus Alan Pence shares insights into how the School of Child and Youth Care came to be, taking listeners back to 1963, when UVic was formed. Dr. Pence's professional work with children began in 1970 as a teacher at an alternative, inner-city high school. During that time, he became concerned that high school was too late to have a maximally positive impact on a child's development. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, he focused on early childhood while completing his PhD. In 1981, he began his academic career, focusing his research on implementing an ecological approach to understanding child care in Canada. Studies undertaken in Victoria and Vancouver led to a large-scale national study of child care. His first book, Ecological Research with Children and Families: From Concepts to Methodology (1988) featured a Foreword by ecological theory founder, Professor Urie Bronfenbrenner.

In 1989, Pence was invited by the Meadow Lake Tribal Council in Saskatchewan to co-envision, and then develop and deliver, an undergraduate program that would incorporate their communities' values and knowledge. The success of that externally evaluated program led to nine additional Tribal organizations co-implementing the program with UVic. The program attracted the interest of the lead for ECD at UNICEF Headquarters, followed by support as well from The World Bank and other international donors. That support led to a set of complementary Capacity-Building and Leadership initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa.