Socialpedagogical dilemmas and ambivalences in a bottom-up professional perspective

Abstract to FESET-conference by associate professor and ph.d-student Gitte Lyng Rasmussen and assistant professor and ph.d. Hanne Meyer-Johansen – both from University College Copenhagen, Denmark
The impetus of this abstract is a research project, developed under a research programme in UCC (University College Capital in Denmark) called Socialpedagogy in the Special pedagogy field. The project is labelled “Socialpedagogical stories” where the aim is to investigate coincides in pedagogical challenges cross the whole social- and special pedagogical field, since these two traditions has been put together in a common specialization in the Danish education of a social educator from 2014.
The aim of the project is to illuminate and get closer to a broader understanding of the tension between the system and human orientation in social pedagogical work. Social pedagogues often go into the professional field to make a positive difference for people, who have special needs or are in social challenged positions. But in the light of the competetive oriented societal paradigm in Scandinavia – from wellfare to workfare (Torfing 2004, Pedersen 2011) – it seems increasing challenging to work with human development that emancipate the users individual needs, dreams and ideals for a good life, since they do not fit into these one-dimensional systemic objectives of self-sufficiency. The classic ideal of a social pedagogue in Denmark has been considered as a street-level advocate for people in marginalized and threatned positions. This ideal might be under pressure in the light of the focus on the responsible user, who might be able to asess his/her own needs – that the professional role might have changed from the normative oriented value-based to a more neo-liberal neutral facilitator role.
Through our empirical studies of socialpedagogical stories we have investigated such issues by making individual and focus group interviews with pedagogues working in a broad range of the social/special-pedagogical field. We have used the same interview guides for all 12 focus group interviews in different pedagogical contexts. Our recognizing interest were to search for elements of a conceptual understanding of social/special pedagogogy from a bottom-up perspective based on the point of view from the practionists. And by extension to see if we can find similarities in common challenges and problems in working with people in so variated vulnarable positions as the social-specialpedagogical field include.
Our tentative findings of our investigations shows that the classical divisions in Denmark between social- and specialpedagogy do not seem very important for the pedagogical professionals in the practical pedagogical field, where they express their drawing on knowledge from different – and sometimes contradictive – perspectives. They suggest to handle the system claims in a pragmatic way, where elements of scientific evidence based methods are interwoven with subjective and relationsbased knowlegde of the individual service user. The service users uniqueness seem to be taking in concern with the scientific and standardized methods and concepts and causes ambivalences and dilemmas in the pedagogical considerations and practises. Our aim and curiosity is to see how to transfer these difficult conditions into the education as teachers to prepare the students to a broad and complex working field