There’s A Place For Us

Author(s):

Tamsin Cavaliero(presenting / submitting)Kate Brown(presenting)Costello Caroline

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research

Format:

Ignite Talk (20 slides in 5 minutes)

Session Information

14 SES 07 A, Cultural, Technological and Multicultural Aspects of School, Family Community Partnerships

Pecha Kucha/Poster Session

Time:

2017-08-23

17:15-18:45

Room:

K3.21

Chair:

Tim Jay

Contribution

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:

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

Method

Drama strategies from the theatre genre, Process Drama were used as an invitation to facilitate the sharing of personal stories and memories connected to place (Even, 2008). Strategies, such as Paper Placement and Guided Tour were used to symbolically represent and explore places of importance to the young people. These became the artistic vehicle that allowed each individual to actively participate in the creative process in order to encounter the other, to share meaningful communication exchanges, a learning about ‘personal alterity’ and to develop a ‘sympathetic understanding’ (Gadamer, 2004). Drama games were used to create a fun environment, to prepare the group emotionally for the deeper creative work and to encourage the group to connect to one another. The project was evaluated using reflective log books which were completed by students, educators and practice partners. In order to alleviate any difficulties concerning traditional forms of literacy which were apparent amongst the Young people, they contributed to the reflective evaluations through the use of video diary discussions. This also served to somewhat alleviate the power imbalance created in literacy environments which may be viewed as unfamiliar to some communities as the Young people were well practiced in some aspects of digital literacy that other members of the team were not. It is important therefore to understand that alternative concepts of ownership exist both within and between communities, and are situated within a context of power relations, combined with a recognition of the importance of reflecting on differences between oral-based and written-based cultures when attempting to examine appropriate ways of working. In addressing issues of power in the research encounter, Marshall and Reason (2007, p. 375) advocate an approach which enables participation to generate high quality knowing, and working actively with issues of power, which includes: ‘active engagement with stakeholders; constructing capacities for inquiry; questioning boundaries of the system; reviewing who counts as stakeholders; the exploration of different kinds of power involved in the research context; attempts to create mutuality, power with, so that others participate on equal terms in the research engagement, and attending to and moderating your own power over which derives from unearned, or earned, privilege’. By viewing the research relationships as encounters rather than research ‘on’ a particular individual or group of people, we have taken our understanding of the term ‘encounter’ in the psychological sense as an authentic, congruent meeting between individuals.

Expected Outcomes

The outcomes from this project included expected and unexpected learning. As expected, students became aware of the need to make micro adjustments to their practice in order to facilitate marginalised Youth. In addition, they began to recognise the trouble with certain ‘identitiy categories’ such as ethnicity and nationality which attempt to capture positions such as ‘Traveller’ and ‘Settled’ yet fail to adequately describe the unique circumstances facing the Young people they were learning with. Overcoming the fear of failure and seeing it as part of the learning journey “By perceiving failure as an integral part of the cycle they address existing fears of failure” (Sutch et al., 2008) Unexpected learning was that educators became students as the module created a shift from a traditional teacher student transmission model to a student-centred approach (Groff and Mouza, 2008, Ertmer, 1999). The idea of multiple authors became apparent through team teaching – learning and accommodating different approaches / teaching styles (Kirkland and Sutch, 2009). Teachers shifted their practice to become ‘brokers of learning’ (Wenger and Etienne, 1998), developing ‘outward facing practice’ (Kirkland and Sutch, 2009). Increased capacity to access social capital is now understood as a skill in it’s own right (Zhao et al., 2002, Zhao and Frank, 2003, Frank et al., 2004). Finally all participants learned to appreciate the qualities of ‘negative capability’ which describes the capacity of human beings to transcend and revise their contexts through the development of an ability to tolerate the pain and confusion of not knowing, rather than imposing ready-made or omnipotent certainties upon an unambiguous situation or emotional challenge.

References

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: The University of Minnesota Press. Ertmer P.E.A (1999) ‘Examining teachers’ beliefs about the role of technology in the elementary classroom’ in Journal of Research on Computing in Education. 32 (1) pp. 54-72 Even, S. (2008) Moving in(To) Imaginary Worlds: Drama Pedagogy for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning. Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German. (40)2, pp. 161-170 Frank, A, Zhao, Y, Borman, K (2004). Social capital and the diffusion of innovations within organizations: The case of computer technology in schools. Sociology of Education, 77: 148–171. Gadamer, H.G (2004) Truth and Method. [1975] Translated by J. Weisheimer & D.J. Marshall. London:Continuum. Groff, J and Mouza, C (2008). A framework for addressing challenges to classroom technology use. AACE Journal, 16,1: 21-46. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2010 ‘To Learn is to Improvise a Movement Along A Way of Life’ The Study of Cognition and Culture Lecture Series, LSE Kirkland, K and Sutch, D. (2009) Overcoming the barriers to educational innovation: A literature review. Futurelab archive. http://archive.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/literature-reviews/Literature-Review1398 Marshall, J. and Reason, P. (2007) ‘Quality in research as ‘taking an attitude of inquiry’’ Management Research News, 30(5), 2007, 368-380. Share, P., Cavaliero, T., and McTaggart, B. (2016) ‘Wicked Problems and Young people: Co-creative teaching for the social professions’. Institute of Technology, Sligo publications. Sutch, D., Rudd, T., & Facer, K. (2008). Promoting transformative innovation. Retrieved from www.futurelab.org.uk/handbooks. Wenger, E. (1998) Wenger, E (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press. Zhao, Y, Pugh, K, Sheldon, S, and Byers, J (2002) ‘Conditions for classroom technology innovations’ in Teachers College Record, 104,3: 482–515. Zhao, Y and Frank, A (2003) ‘Factors affecting technology uses in schools: an ecological perspective’ in American Educational Research Journal. 40,4: 807–840.

Author Information

Tamsin Cavaliero (presenting / submitting)

IT Sligo

Social Sciences

Sligo

Kate Brown (presenting)

IT Sligo

Social Sciences

Sligo

Costello Caroline

North Connacht Youth and Community Services

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.