Everyday Expertise in Social Pedagogy

An International Journal of Social Pedagogy special issue.

 

Reactions to increasing global complexity seek to manage ambiguity and uncertainty through narrowing the range of possible pedagogical responses. This is evident in attempts to codify professional knowledge in competency or standards frameworks and to systematise practice through ‘evidence-based’ manuals. At the same time, scholarship on learning and teaching identifies the key quality of the contemporary professional as a capacity to cope with epistemological uncertainty and complexity, which, together, result in an existential experience of ‘strangeness’ (Barnett, 2004).

Attempts to simplify, codify and prescribe professional knowledge and, through this, professional practice, pose real problems for social pedagogical work. Social pedagogical knowledge is not abstract, overly scientific but is situated, contingent, fluid and, crucially, it incorporates the experiential knowledge that derives from the lives of those with whom social pedagogues work. In social pedagogy, professionals might be thought of as ‘experts in the everyday’ (Cameron, 2014). Our work is a self-in-action endeavour, which, by its nature, demands ontological and reflexive examination of how we ‘are’ with one another.

This special issue seeks to draw out what might be involved in such everyday expertise and how social pedagogy equips professionals to meaningfully respond in complex and uncertain situations. We are looking for papers that begin to draw out social pedagogy’s knowledge base and how this might be defined and contrasted with ‘evidence-based’ or manualized approaches to practice.

Publication date: 31 August 2020 (articles are publsihed in the special issue as and when ready after peer review)

 

---

Guest Editors

Mr Sebastian Monteux, School of Applied Sciences, Division of Health Sciences, Abertay University and NHS Tayside, UK
Prof Mark Smith, Professor of Social Work, School of Education and Social Work, Dundee University, UK

 

---

Article list

Articles will be listed here upon publication.

Introduction: Everyday Expertise in Social Pedagogy special issue

Mark Smith and Sebastian Monteux
Published: 01 December 2020

 

Weaving a philosophical thread linking everyday practice and theory when ‘it depends … ’

Cecile Remy
Published: 01 December 2020

 

Towards recognising practitioners working in out-of-home care as experts in everyday life: A conceptual critique

Claire Cameron
Published: 16 November 2020

 

It really does depend: Towards an epistemology (and ontology) for everyday social pedagogical practice

Mark Smith
Published: 10 November 2020

 

Social pedagogical perspectives on fidelity to a manual: Professional principles and dilemmas in everyday expertise

Lotte Junker Harbo and Robyn Kemp
Published: 14 September 2020

 

Human encounters: The core of everyday care practice

Sebastian Monteux and Angelika Monteux
Published: 07 September 2020

 

Play therapy insights into everyday social pedagogical practice in residential child care

Mie Engen, Line Søberg Bjerre and Mogens Jensen
Published 31 August 2020

 

Returning to the heart of teaching: Social pedagogy as phenomenological pedagogy

Adrian Schoone
Published: 31 August 2020