Abstract
The Graduate Diploma in Youth Work is in its fifth year at Concordia University in Montreal. In a department committed to experiential teaching and the training of practitioners, a large focus of the program is to immerse students in experiences that prepare them for engaging in reflexive and theoretically informed approaches to practice. The purpose of this article will be to illustrate our program model through four learning activities that are representative of our unique approach to youth worker education. An additional focus will be the ways in which our model and these activities align with the Association for Child and Youth Care Practice competencies.
 
 A model of integrative youth work education was developed in 2015 by Ranahan, Blanchet-Cohen and Mann-Feder to form the basis for an advanced Graduate Diploma in youth work in Montreal, Quebec (Concordia University, n.d.). The purpose of this article is to share four structured experiential learning activities that illustrate this model. Prior to describing the activities, an overview of our approach to integrative youth work will be provided, along with a discussion of how it aligns with the competencies for practice developed by the Association for Child and Youth Care Practice (ACYCP) (Association for Child and Youth Care Practice, 2010).
Highlights
The Graduate Diploma in Youth Work is in its fifth year at Concordia University in Montreal
A model of integrative youth work education was developed in 2015 by Ranahan, Blanchet-Cohen and Mann-Feder to form the basis for an advanced Graduate Diploma in youth work in Montreal, Quebec (Concordia University, n.d.)
Prior to describing the activities, an overview of our approach to integrative youth work will be provided, along with a discussion of how it aligns with the competencies for practice developed by the Association for Child and Youth Care Practice (ACYCP) (Association for Child and Youth Care Practice, 2010)
Summary
The Graduate Diploma in Youth Work is in its fifth year at Concordia University in Montreal. Child and Youth Care educational programs are rarely combined with training in community youth development (Magnuson, 2005) This reflects the orientation of the academic department in which the program is housed, which features degree programs that train students to engage in normative-re-educative practice (MannFeder & Litner, 2004). This means that all of our programs, including the Diploma, stress strength based intervention and the active involvement of the client or client system in any change process. The integration of CYC, PSYED and CYD reflects the unique network of publicly funded services in Quebec, where child welfare and juvenile justice work in shared administrative structures with community agencies to provide a range of preventative and treatment programs in both French and English. The faculty who developed the Youth Work Diploma were faced with the task of developing a model that would promote coherence and clarity across three practice disciplines that rarely, if ever, have been taught in the same academic program
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