Social work as pedagogy of the encounter

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Social work as pedagogy of the encounter

• Older peoples perspective
• on social support
• and community-based social services
• Griet Verschelden Tine Vanthuyne
• University College of Ghent
• Faculty of Social Work and Welfare Studies,
  Belgium
• griet.verschelden_at_hogent.be

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Content of the contribution

• Perspective of service users and client
  participation
• Discourses on ageing
• Our own research and some results
• Relational citizenship
• Enacting social work from relational citizenship
• Social work as pedagogy of the encounter
• Implications for social workers role

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Perspective of service users and client
participation

• Participatory approach can address issues of
  power inequality
• Client participation is not evidently a positive
  notion and not evidently realised resistance,
  tokenism,
• Appealing for participation can also be seen as
  coercive
• Impact for social workers less appreciation or
  recognition, report a dominant consumerist
  attitude,

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Discourses on ageing

• Social welfare
• Older people enjoy well-deserved piece and
  quietness
• Passive persons in need of care
• Active ageing
• Older people enjoy life has to stay healthy and
  active
• Independency, consuming attitude is cultivated
• Productive ageing
• Older people must contribute to community in
  their own capacity
• Discours of empowerment, social cultural
  capital
• Assumption more contribution prevents isolation
  and brings generations together

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What kind of citizenship?

• Responsabilization of the elderly
• Coercive use of support programs aimed at
  creating active and productive citizens
• Governmentality of the entrepreneurial self
• ? This notion of citizenship and underlying myth
  of autonomy constructs the image of a responsible
  citizen with individual responsibility over his
  or her life and social integration

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What kind of citizenship?

• Taking control of ones life, or particular
  aspects of it, is not only seen as being
  intimatly connected with the formation or
  reformation on the self as empowered, it is
  increasingly becoming an ethical obligation of
  the new citizenry
• (Baistow, 1994 37)

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What kind of citizenship?

• Those people who refuse to become responsible
  and govern themselves ethically have also refused
  the offer to become members
• of our moral community
• (Rose, 1999 1407)

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Our research

• Older peoples perspectives on social support and
  community-based social services
• Community-based social service centres what?
• Three parts in the research project
• focus groups
• survey 754 gt 689 (55, users and non-users)
• roundtables
• Research questions
• Which forms of formal and informal support do
  service users appeal to and what is the place and
  the meaning of the centres?
• Which are possible mechanism of in- and
  exclusion?

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Some results

• Integrated services
• Broad range of services most important motivation
  to make use
• Recreational and educational activities bring
  oxygen and create space to social health care
• Care and support cannot be framed in advance (by
  professionals) and cannot be marked out in a
  defined stringent set
• Cf. joined-up thinking seamless

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Some results

• Facilitating encounters in- and outside
• Meeting other people and doing new things
• In these encounters care is realised
• Also encounters which are less obvious
• Possibilities for intercultural and
  intergenerational encounters
• Pitfall
• Image of centres as mostly for older people !
• Some individuals and groups risk to be excluded
  from the empowering potential

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Some results

• Importance of pedagogical relationships
• Relationships above products and services
• Users visit centres a lot and stay long
• Social workers not as experts, but as
  professionals who enact and co-construct

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Some results

• Voluntary work
• More than half lower number reported
• Different forms and support
• Service users as co-worker / organiser
• Added value is inside and outside the centres

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Relational citizenship

• Social support and social services without
  predefined outcome and with possibilities for
  (informal) encounter that shap a shared
  responsibility from traditional lens to
  citizenship to relational citizenship
• Cf. feminist thinking and
• philosophy of care (Tronto, Nussbaum)

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Relational citizenship

• Dutch researcher Jeanette Pols
• Relationships are purposefully developed as the
  goal of care
• Relational citizenship is a form of sociability
  in which citizens acknowledge their dependence
  and interdependence on each other
• Challenges assumptions underpinning the concept
  of active citizenship (myth of autonomy
  independency)

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Enacting social work from the perspective of
relational citizenship

• Enacting studying phenomena in action,
  which leads to different stories than talk
  about them
• ? doing social work and citizenship in
  practice
• Different conceptions of citizenship, underlying
  assumptions of the good citizen
• Reflection on what are different forms of good
  social work

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Notions of citizenship social work

• The personally responsible citizen
• Developing individual competences to act
  responsible in the community
• Distracts attention from analysis of the causes
  of social problems no collective action
• The participatory citizen
• Collective action related to participation in
  civic affairs and community life
• The justice oriented citizen
• Critically analyzing and addressing social issues
  and injustices
• Least common, and also risks to exclude and
  reinforce existing inequalities demanding, new
  model?

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Social work as pedagogy of the encounter

• Co-construction of public space and stresses the
  importance of agency
• Social work as a forum on which people (are
  supported to) express their concerns and
  negotiate their claims

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Social work as pedagogy of the encounter

• Not looking for interventions and programs that
  enhance autonomy and empowement, but looking at
  how empowerment as well as interdependency,
  relations en encounters are enacted and
  performed
• Social work is first and foremost relational !
• ? Pedagogy of the encounter (Dahlberg Moss)
• Reflective questions about living together and
  how this living is shaped, what dialogical spaces
  are made possible and how solidarity can be
  facilitated (Vandenbroeck, 2008)

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Implications for social workers role

• Social interventions not as technologies to
  enhance peoples responsibilities, but social
  work as shared responsibility between public and
  private domains
• Focus on the question what social work
  interventions mean for service users (and non
  users), rather than on their active involement

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Implications for social workers role

• Pedagogical relation is central, but in relation
  to reflection on the meaning of intervention with
  regard to society
• They attempt to grasp the personal, cultural,
  economic and historical influences that push and
  pull the lives of people, and mirror these
  diverse private stories to society by locating
  them in te realm of public-democratic action
  (OBrien, 1994 6 and 17)
• Social work is a political proces!

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• THANK YOU !
• QUESTIONS ?
• Griet Verschelden Tine Vanthuyne
• University College of Ghent
• Faculty of Social Work and Welfare Studies,
  Belgium
• griet.verschelden_at_hogent.be