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Conference Program

Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).

Daily Overview

Session

E.13. Democratic Practices, Expansive Learning and the Commons in Education
Location: Aule di Botanica (CU028): Aula Blu2

Convenor(s): Magdalini Kolokitha (University of Thessaly, Greece); Angeliki Lazaridou (University of Thessaly, Greece)

Presentation 4

Reconceptualizing Social Intervention with Children and Families from Individual and Reactive to Systemic and Participatory. A Change Lab

Diego Di Masi¹, Chiara Sità²

1: University of Torino, Italy; 2: University of Verona, Italy

Background

In the Italian child protection system, Pronto Intervento Minori (PIM) offers the first response to emergency situations involving children and families (homelessness, undocumented families, transition to residential care for children in severe risk).

Bronfenbrenner (1979; 2005) connects learning and development to ecological transitions. In the bio-ecological model, changes in relations, roles, and activity have a high developmental potential. However, the critical point experienced by professionals in the PIM’s activity is the risk to operate in a routine, merely reactive way, and to reduce both children and family agency, and creative space for professionals.

Following a major reorganization of emergency social interventions in the municipality, the PIM working group has launched a Change Lab (Virkkunen, Newnham, 2013) with two researchers to better define its approach and function within the welfare system in Milan.

Aims

The research aims to explore the reconceptualization of the motive of PIM during a Change Lab using the lens of expansive learning and concept formation in the wild (Engestrom, 2024).

Methods

The data collection and analysis followed two interconnected lines.

An ethnographic research using observation of team meetings, document analysis, interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders (PIM team, social workers from the municipality, psychologists, coordinators, local welfare manager, consultants from the municipality, educators and psychologists working in residential care, and a mother) was aimed at both describing the organizational culture of PIM and identifying key elements that could be used as second stimuli during the Change Lab sessions.

The Change Lab sessions, recorded and analyzed through content analysis aimed to identify the emerging conceptualizations of PIM’s work. CL entailed:

the historical analysis of PIM and its changes due to new global phenomena (migration, wars…) that have shaped the identity and functions of PIM over the years;
analysis of current professional practice and its challenges.

Results

During the Change Lab sessions, professionals recognize a distance between their work and the current representation of themselves and their organization as “emergency experts” whose intervention is limited to responding quickly to immediate, mostly instrumental needs. Exploring the actors’ experience and trajectories during this phase led the group to work on a new conceptualization: while previous narratives defined PIM as an “emergency room” focused on providing first aid and referring the “patient” to a social care service once stabilized, the new conceptualization describes PIM professionals as actors who take care not only for individual needs but also for the developmental potential of systems during transitions, thus re-defining their motive and positioning from an individually-targeted, reactive and deficit-focused model to an activity system that is participatory and “collaboratively responsive” (Edwards et al., 2009). This concept engages professionals in a reconceptualization of their work as a systemic action that can sustain a democratic reconfiguring of the social care system in the city, starting from the most challenging transitions experienced by children and families.