This presentation offers an overview of a HIP Inter-Professional Project created to inform the development of learning resources for social care practice (SCP) students working with Marginalised Youth.  For the purpose of this presentation, we will discuss the approach to learning for SCP students from IT Sligo and Young people who are members of the Irish Travelling Community, and, our learning as facilitators of the process.  The focus of the project is on strengthening social inclusion and active participation of marginalized youth and integrating them into work or education.  The project aims to improve the ability of current and future practitioners (current students) in the SCP field to work inter-professionally and inter-sectorally so that they can innovatively work towards new solutions to problems involving marginalized youth.

The project began as a three year European project funded by an EU lifelong learning programme between 5 Higher Education Institutes, 4 practice partners, students and Young people. Partner countries included, Denmark, Romania, Spain, The Netherlands and Ireland.  The project was created to inform the development of learning resources for SCP students as documented in the text ‘Wicked Problems and Young people: Co-creative teaching for the social professions’ (Share, Cavaliero and McTaggart, 2016).

As part of the project an interprofessional module was developed between all research partners and then piloted in each country.  The module focussed on how to create an innovative environment – a practice scenario – where inter-professional skills (personal, professional and contextual) can be trained and facilitated and co-created solutions can be formed in collaboration between the participants: students, lecturers, practitioners and Young People. The interprofessional module in Ireland (which was delivered on campus in order to introduce Young people to life at a Higher Education Institution comprised of lecturers, students, practice partners from a local Youth Service and 4 Young People from the Travelling Community.

The project was titled There’s a Place for Us and addressed issues of exclusion/inclusion, accessible spaces, and gate keepers in order to create a safe place from the unfamiliar and invite each participant into an educational space.  Through playing together, sharing stories and personal memories connected to place, touring the campus, and engaging in drama activitites the shared understandings of belonging to and identifying with places and the feelings of exclusion in relation to certain places were explored.

The research questions that informed our practice were:

1. How do Social care practitioners create a welcoming environment for marginalized Youth?
2. How do Social care educators teach the skills necessary to create a facilitative environment for marginalized Youth?
3. What can Young Travellers teach SCP students about working with marginalized Youth?
4. What can Young Travellers teach SCP educators about working with marginalized Youth?

Our approach to supporting student learning on the HIP pilot module is best described by anthropologist Tim Ingold, who argues that it is through wayfaring, not transmission that we gain knowledge, “we know as we go” (Ingold 2010). Coupled with this is our appreciation of knowledge acquisition from a rhizomatic perspective (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), as opposed to a more hierarchical tree-like structure whereby the student moves up through various layers of theory and knowledge.  Distilling this understanding and imprinting it on Boyer’s Scholarship of Engagement led us to interesting areas of learning. These being: Keat’s Negative Capability, whereby human beings have the capacity to transcend and revise their contexts, teachers as brokers of learning (Wenger and Etienne, 1998) who are particularly important in developing new practices within, and across, communities of practice and overcoming the fear of failure to see it as part of the learning journey (Sutch et al 2008).

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