Systemic Reflexivity in Residential Child Care: A Pedagogical Frame to Empower Professional Competence

Abstract

This position paper offers a pedagogical frame to empower professional work in residential child care. Jobs in this demanding field are characterized by daily relationships with children of different ages, needs, and cultural backgrounds. There is a need for effective communication and interaction with them, their families, co-workers, other professionals, and care agencies, as well as with the larger community. This complexity brings uncertainty and the necessity of thinking and acting in a sensitive way in order to open possibilities for systemic transformation at the micro, meso, and macro levels. In this framework, we focus on reflexivity as a meta-competence — a set of specific postures, competences, and attitudes that characterize expert professional action. A thorough literature review on reflexivity in social work and child protection is aimed at clarifying the meanings, uses, and features of this concept. We claim that systemic reflexivity can be used as a framework, a methodology, and a set of tools to empower professional work by enhancing emotional, cognitive, and epistemic self-awareness, systemic wisdom, abduction, and active listening. To help workers and teams develop these five competences, a self-directed learning module is currently being designed, based on systemic and narrative perspectives, and transformative learning theory.

The transformative dance of the crisis to resignify social educational work: auto-ethnographical reflections on a cooperative enquiry in Northern Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The crisis understood as a potentially evolutionary process (Morin, 2016;Alhadeff-Jones, 2021) and the possibility of setting up spaces of thinkability in uncertainty have put in the field investigated a process of systemic reflexivity (Jude, 2018;Formenti & Rigamonti, 2020) that involved the micro level (the individual participants involved in the research-training paths), the meso level (the relationships between the participants) and the macro level (the laws).…”

“…The prolongation of the pandemic emergency over the months made me and my colleagues aware of the need to find ways to inhabit uncertainty but also to reflect in systemic way (Jude, 2018;Formenti & Rigamonti, 2020) on the premises underlying the usual choreographies that, until then, had characterised the social educational work of the services. What differences and choreographic variations were brought about by the crisis?…”

Dancing the Crisis and Its Transformative Potential: A Cooperative and Performative Research With an Italian Disability Service System During the Coronavirus Pandemic

“…This large research project had investigated the relationships activated at the micro level (between individuals: professional-user, professional-family member, …), at the meso level (between systems: service-family, service-institutions, service-territory) and at the macro level (between service networks) in that period. The research also aimed to facilitate a process of systemic reflexivity (Formenti & Rigamonti, 2020) that could critically interrogate professional practices and the organisation of services.…”

Igniting Pathways for Land-Based Healing: Possibilities for Institutional Accountability

“…Comparable to the use of reflexivity as a social work competence, a soft-reform space only requires institutions to engage in processes of self-reflection and demonstrating self-awareness regarding its "positionality". Institutional reflexivity may extend to practices of listening and considering multiple perspectives in the deliberation of certain decisions informed by a seemingly superficial analysis of power, privilege and oppression, which reveals socially constructed hierarchies (such as through the appointment of DEI task forces or committees) but allows it to remain uninvolved with any particular course of action to change these (Ahmed 2006;Formenti and Rigamonti 2020).…”