A service user perspectives on socialpedagogical practise and professionalism

Abstract to NERA Conference 2020 – Network of Socialpedagogy: A Round Table of the theme: Ethical Challenges in work with people in vulnerable positions in social pedagogical practice, research and education
Title: Socialpedagogical professionalism in a service user perspective
By Hanne Meyer-Johansen, ph.d. and assistant lecturer at Copenhagen University College, Denmark
Research topic/aim Pluralistic and diverged socialpedagogical professionals perspectives between the clash of professional identity and the needs, dreams and individual perspectives of the service users.
My projects is a long-lasting projects from 2017 about new professional perspectives in the in the socialpedagogical working field. The aim of the project is to explore the occurrence of common professional challenges, potentials, ideals and perspectives between the wide range of service user group, who are the subject of pedagogical practice. The further perspective of this aim is to develop relevant knowledge for the danish education of Social Educators, where the specialization of Social- and specialpedagogy is including a wide range of target groups. Inspired by Action Research a part of the research project is including dialogue workshops with a selected group of professional pedagogues that is based on Olav Eikelands discourse ethical dialogue principles (Eikeland 2005). These professional separated perspectives these will be supplied and challenged by the datas from a number of focus group interviews with service users who are or have been depended and interacting with professionals pedagogues and have personal experiences with professional ways to be met. The aim of that methological “grip” is to take the increasing scientific and political focus on service user perspectives seriously by including experiences from service users in a developmental professional investigation. The question is how these voices can challenge and expand the professional horizon and self-understanding and incorporate a more pluralistic point of view as a source to relevant pedagogical practice?
Methodological design: The project is from its beginning based on a number of qualitative interviews – both individual and focusgroup interviews with a range of professional pedagogues. The next step in the project has supplemented and validated these interview foundings with Dialogue workshops, inspired by Action Research. The third step we went back to the classical individual- and focus group interviews with service users and the last datacollecting step will be another dialogue workshops for the pedagouges where the foundings from the service user interviews will be presented. The worksop will be organised as a kind of future workshop, where the common developmental professional perspectives will be in focus (Nielsen 2012).
I expect to find discrepants between the professional and service users perspectives that can surprise and start reflections among the pedagogues. That might be discussed as an important source of knowledge to their professional practice. And how can the ambivalence between the professional need for common perspectives and approaches and need of differentiated individual concern and awareness be overcomed?
Relevance to Nordic educational research: This project is relevant in the light of the actual need of redefining the professional role in a competition and measurable oriented society where pedagogues tends to loose authonomy and meet more and more obstacles to make relevant and user oriented developmental processes in cooperation with the service users. Many systemic mechanismens and top down management pushes the agenda for the professional pedagogical work away from its central aim and purpose – away from realizing peoples own wishes and dreams for the life they want to live. And dialogue seems to be the only way to get into these subjectives understandings of life quality. And time for dialogue and developing confident relationships between service users and the professionals is confirmed in my datamaterial as extriemely challenging since time is the scarcest resource in the contemporary welfare work life due to the ongoing competition state.