Social work as pedagogy of the encounter

1. Social work as pedagogy of the encounter Older people’s 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@hogent.be

2. 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

3. 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, …

4. 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

5. 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

6. What kind of citizenship? “Taking control of one’s 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)

7. 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)

8. Our research • Older people’s 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 > 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?

9. 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”

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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)

14. Relational citizenship • Dutch researcherJeanette 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)

15. 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

16. 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?

17. 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

18. 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)

19. Implications for social workers’ role • Social interventions not as technologies to enhance people’s 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

20. 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” (O’Brien, 1994: 6 and 17) • Social work is a political proces!

21. THANK YOU ! QUESTIONS ? … Griet Verschelden & Tine Vanthuyne University College of Ghent Faculty of Social Work and Welfare Studies, Belgium griet.verschelden@hogent.be