Curious Conversations: Interventive discussions with drug abusing youth
By Jamie ‘JC’ Chambers
April 2009
“Dude, I have lied so much that even now I don’t know what the truth is!” ~ Adam
“Hey, now I understand how it feels to be broken in on and I just want to say I feel so bad for the families I have broken in on!” ~Billie
“There’s a part of me that understands I need to quit but there’s another part of me that just doesn’t care… I get mixed up sometimes!” ~Lexa
These comments are just a sample of the statements that have been growing out of our discussions in MRS group on Tuesday and Friday afternoons. MRS stands for Motivating Recovery Solutions, a prevention program designed to address the needs of youth caught in the web of abusing substances. We have been working with kids in the schools of Sioux Falls, South Dakota for approximately eight years. Facilitating this group of young people has been both a great challenge and an adventure. I’d like to take this opportunity to share with you what we are currently being taught by these kids!
This program in its genesis has been organized around the principles of positive peer culture (Vorrath, Brendtro, and Ness, 1985). The principles, or as we call them, the commitments we adhere to and teach the youth are – a commitment to:
1. Building trust, openness, and honesty among the youth;
2. Allowing the newbies to sit, listen and learn the group process;
3. Helping and evaluating one another’s interactions with each other and reactions outside the group;
4. Youth helping and aiding youth;
5. Guiding youth discussions and inquiry from behind and below.
These commitments have grounded our group and promoted positive and helpful interaction. By helpful I mean – enabling youth in the group to discuss and respond to one another in a manner that promotes insider inspection. Healthy and respectful dialogue between peers seems to be the result of the youths buy-in on these five commitments.
Recently, we have tried an experiment. The purpose and nature of our group has moved us to a discussion format. Our desire was to create discussions that help youth evaluate their decisions and challenge them to consider sobriety as one solution. Consequently, we have added to our process what we are calling ethnographic styled inquiry. This means that we hope to promote discussions that attends to the youth drug use culture in a manner that the youth discover their own mutually held set(s) of expectations and explanations (Wolcott, H., 1988, p. 193). Also, we hope that they might dialogue with one another in a manner that their own meanings and attributions surface for inspection.
It has become our job(s) as adult facilitators to change our style of facilitation so that natural youth-to-youth conversation can occur. Now, we watch superficial interaction develop naturally into conversation about the pain, hurt, confusion, anger and mistakes made in their lives, and see that they have become both the evaluators and motivators of their lives. We have observed a tough kindness that seems to be the result of young people beginning to understand how to balance empathy and challenge.
The kids transformed right in front of our eyes! They went from being youth we wanted to ‘help’ to informants to each other and us as facilitators. We view these young people as well informed, articulate, approachable, informative translators of their culture. They now see themselves as the holders of the keys to escape from the web of substance abuse and multiple layers of trouble.
We, too, have been changed by their transformation. Our new role is not to posture as the resident expert but to be a curious conductor whose goal is to aide them in inspecting, evaluating, and determining the direction of their own lives. Our tools have been simple – a spirit of curiosity and questions – questions that require the youth to compare and classify relationships (people and things), beliefs, values, thoughts, and responses as well as questions that challenge the group’s patterns of interaction and reaction to each other and other in their world. In agreement with Nelson, Fleuridas, & Rosenthal (1986), this style of inquiry and facilitation serves as an indirect means of providing new information and opportunities to change (p.119).
References
Nelson, T., Fleuridas, C., & Rosenthal, D., 1986. The evolution of circular questions: Training family therapists. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, Vol. 12, No 2, 113-117
Vorrath, H. & Brendtro, L. 1985. Positive peer culture. Aldine Transaction; 2 edition.
Wolcott, H. 1988. Ethnographic research in education. Complementary methods for research in education, R. M. Jaeger, ed. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
