Recognising Potential – the Social Pedagogy Diamond

Posted on January 20, 2017January 20, 2017 by Gabriel Eichsteller

‘A child has a hundred possibilities:
A child has a hundred languages,
A hundred hands,
A hundred thoughts.
S/he has a hundred ways of thinking,
A hundred ways of playing,
A hundred ways of talking.’

(Loris Malaguzzi, Italian pedagogue and founder of Reggio Emilia)

The Diamond Model is one of the most powerful concepts in social pedagogy and highlights that each person has a wealth of resources to offer which professionals can draw upon in order to empower people to create meaningful change in their lives. The model is a constant reminder that, as practitioners, we can only facilitate change in another person if we focus on uncovering and nurturing their potential, and support them in bringing out their inner diamonds.

ThemPra’s Social Pedagogy Diamond course outlines the overarching aims and aspirations of social pedagogy and illustrates the role of social pedagogical practitioners to help children, young people or other individuals across the age range to discover their innate potential and resources. As an introductory 3-day course aiming to raise awareness and create further interest in social pedagogy, the course will enable you to experientially engage with core social pedagogical concepts and to explore the relevance of social pedagogy for your practice. Following the Diamond Model, we will explore how you can enhance children’s/adults’ well-being and happiness, create holistic learning opportunities and further strengthen their relationships in ways that empower the people you support in your practice.

The Diamond course is facilitated over 3 consecutive days using a variety of learning methods to make social pedagogy become real – through experiential learning activities, group discussions, theoretical inputs, reflection and action planning on how you can help other people shine. If you’re interested in the course, please download our brochure, which includes the registration form for our next Social Pedagogy Diamond course in Glasgow on 21-23 March. Alternatively, you can stay informed by joining our emailing list, liking us on our Facebook page or getting in touch with any questions via email.

The Diamond Model explained:

ThemPra’s Diamond Model (Eichsteller & Holthoff, 2012) symbolizes one of the most fundamental underpinning principles of social pedagogy: there is a diamond within all of us. As human beings we are all precious and have a rich variety of knowledge, skills and abilities. Not all diamonds are polished and sparkly, but all have the potential to be. Similarly, every person has the potential to shine out – and social pedagogy is about supporting them in this. Therefore, social pedagogy has four core aims that are closely linked: well-being and happiness, holistic learning, relationship, and empowerment.

Well-being and happiness:

The overarching aim of all social pedagogic practice is to provide well-being and happiness, not on a short-term needs-focused basis, but sustainably, through a rights-based approach. While the terms ‘well-being’ and ‘happiness’ are sometimes seen as one and the same, in our understanding they are notionally different: happiness describes a present state whereas well-being describes a long-lasting sense of physical, mental, emotional and social well-being. In combination we can get a holistic view of a person’s well-being and happiness. Importantly, well-being and happiness are very individual and subjective: what causes happiness is highly individual. As a result social pedagogical practice is very context-specific and highly responsive to the individual rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach.

Holistic learning:

‘Learning is the pleasant anticipation of one’s self’, according to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. In this sense, holistic learning mirrors the aim of well-being and happiness – it must be seen as contributing to, or enhancing, our well-being. Learning is more than what happens at school, it is a holistic process of realizing our own potential for learning and growth, which can take place in every situation that offers a learning opportunity. Holistic learning is a life-long process involving ‘head, heart, and hands’ (Pestalozzi). Social pedagogy is about creating learning opportunities, so that people get a sense of their own potential and how they have developed. As we are all unique, so is our potential for learning and our way of learning and development.

Relationship:

Central to achieving these two aims is the pedagogic relationship. Through the supportive relationship with the social pedagogue a person can experience that someone cares for and about them, that they can trust somebody. This is about giving them the social skills to be able to build strong positive relationships with others. Therefore the pedagogic relationship must be a personal relationship between human beings – social pedagogues make use of their personality and have to be authentic in the relationship, which is not the same as sharing private matters. So the pedagogic relationship is professional and personal at the same time, thus requiring from the social pedagogue to be constantly reflective.

Empowerment:

Alongside the relationship, empowerment is crucial in order to ensure that an individual experiences a sense of control over their life, feels involved in decisions affecting them, and is able to make sense of their own universe. Empowerment also means that the individual is able to take on ownership and responsibility for their own learning and their own well-being and happiness, as well as their relationship with the community. Social pedagogy is therefore about supporting people’s empowerment, their independence as well as interdependence.

Positive Experiences:

In order to realize these core aims, social pedagogy has to be about providing positive experiences. The power of experiencing something positive – something that makes someone happy, something they have achieved, a new skill they have learned, the caring support from someone else – has a double impact: it raises the individuals self-confidence and feeling of self-worth, so it reinforces their sense of well-being, of learning, of being able to form a strong relationship, or of feeling empowered; and by strengthening their positives the person also improves their weak sides so that negative notions about their self fade away.

Conclusions:

Due to its inter-disciplinary roots, social pedagogy offers a conceptual framework that can help guide holistic practice. As an academic discipline, social pedagogy uses related research, theories and concepts from other sciences to ensure a holistic perspective. This means that in realizing those core aims there is a lot of inspiration to be taken from what research and concepts tell us about related areas. All four aims point at the fact that social pedagogy is about process. Well-being and happiness, holistic learning, relationship, empowerment – none of these are a product that, once achieved, can be forgotten. This is why it is important to perceive them as fundamental human rights that we all constantly need to work on if we want to ensure that nobody’s rights are violated or neglected.

This perspective of social pedagogy means that it is dynamic, creative, and process-orientated rather than mechanical, procedural, and automated. It demands from social pedagogues to be a whole person, not just a pair of hands. It is therefore not surprising that many professionals in the UK and elsewhere have taken a keen interest in social pedagogy and have found it possible to relate both at a personal and professional level to its ethical orientation and ambition to provide children and young people with the best possible life experiences.

Celebrating Head, Heart, Hands

Posted on November 15, 2016 by Gabriel Eichsteller

An Open Letter from the Social Pedagogy Consortium

Dear friends and colleagues,

At the end of the Head, Heart, Hands programme we, as members of the Social Pedagogy Consortium, want to send greetings to all its participants and all who showed a lively interest in it. We want to thank you for your contribution to its many successes and hope you’ve found the experience as valuable as we have, as delivery partners with The Fostering Network. With them, we set out, four years ago, to demonstrate the practical and theoretical value of social pedagogy for UK foster carers and their young people.

Over that time, our appreciation both of fostering and of the potential of social pedagogy for the UK has grown. It has been a complex programme: Several hundred people were involved, with many different roles, duties and perspectives, not to mention a wide variety of settings. These ranged from the intensely rural to the inner city, from the South of England to the far North of Scotland. Unsurprisingly, such differences presented challenges for this national programme, but they also gave opportunities for learning and contributed much to the richness of the programme.

From our point of view, Head, Heart, Hands was stimulating, hugely interesting, intense, demanding, challenging, rewarding, and often a lot of fun – perhaps many of you felt the same. In each site the programme set up learning and development courses mainly involving foster carers but also social workers and other personnel. It was an opportunity for all to share in the same learning experience and to develop a common language about the work and the young people they had responsibility for. We found that most participants were very appreciative of this opportunity.

Many foster carers said that their confidence in relating to the children had increased and they shared inspiring examples of how the children were benefitting. For these foster carers, social pedagogy wasn’t just ‘good practice’, it was about developing a new perspective on the work, finding ways into more reflective practice and valuing their own contribution more highly. They often told us how they’d found creative ways of building relationships and of sharing family life with their foster children. They also said that the programme had enabled them to react differently – and successfully – when difficulties arose, because they could adapt their learning to their own situations. When they needed to speak up for young people in the outside world, they now felt better able to professionally challenge, request change and discuss issues with other professionals, as confident members of the team around the child. Developing confident team work is just one aspect of social pedagogy that is different from many other approaches.

We found it very impressive that most of the foster carers involved, the five local authorities and the two independent providers stayed with the programme through its highs and lows. Also, as a result of the programme, a number of strong advocates for social pedagogy have emerged, who continue their learning and development with great dedication.

We want to thank and congratulate The Fostering Network for undertaking Head, Heart, Hands and all of you have worked so hard to make it a success. Now, we’re looking forward to new growth that will enable the achievements and learning of Head, Heart, Hands to live on across the UK. The Social Pedagogy Professional Association (SPPA) will launch in 2017, and Ofqual-recognised qualifications, now in development, will follow. There will be opportunities for people who have already undertaken courses in social pedagogy to take their existing learning forward to accreditation at Diploma level.

Individual and organisational membership of SPPA will be open to different professionals working with people across the age range. To begin with, SPPA will have a home in UCL Institute of Education (see www.sppa-uk.org) before it stands on its own feet in 2019. We warmly invite foster carers, among many other occupations, to help us make SPPA a vibrant community of practice, creating change such as that which resulted from Head, Heart, Hands.

We are looking forward to meeting and working with many of you in the future,

Abby, Thure, Manuel, Kristina, Pat, Robyn, Sylvia, Andy, Alex, Charlotte, Gabriel and Christina

group-orkney-20jul2015-yell-2 — Head, Heart, Hands site and programme team at Orkney practice group, 20-21 July, 2015

2016-11-15

Developing a Massive Open Online Course in Social Pedagogy across Europe

Posted on September 20, 2016October 10, 2017 by Gabriel Eichsteller

We’re delighted to announce that ThemPra has been awarded with a substantial 3-year Erasmus+ grant to develop a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in social pedagogy! In realising this long-term ambition, we’re really pleased to be able to draw on the collective expertise of an international partnership with the University of Central Lancashire (UK), UCC Copenhagen (Denmark), Common View (Denmark), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain), Ghent University (Belgium), Masaryk University (Czech Republic), Kocaeli University (Turkey) and KJSH Verbund für Kinder-, Jugend- und Soziale Hilfen (Germany), who will all provide many amazing insights into practice innovations and the role of social pedagogy in their respective countries. Thanks to EU funding we will be able to offer the 9 MOOC sessions free of charge. We hope that the course will reach many people around the globe and contribute to social pedagogy developments internationally, particularly in countries where interest in social pedagogy is still relatively new. As we want these ideas to travel far and wide, we will also put together a research report to strategically support policy-makers in implementing social pedagogy innovations across cultural barriers.

We’re very keen to start building a network of critical friends and interested allies who want to help us make this a unique learning resource that inspires students, practitioners and policy-makers alike. We’re planning to pilot the MOOC with 100 international learners next year and to share this more widely in 2018. We will also form a multiplier network and critical friends groups in each country to inform the development of the MOOC. If you would like to get involved, please watch the below video and send us an email or sign up to our emailing list (form in the right column) to receive further updates!

The project is funded under the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme Key Action 2: Cooperation for Innovation and the Exchange of Good Practices. More details about the project can be found here.

Social Pedagogical Leadership

Posted on August 30, 2016September 29, 2016 by Gabriel Eichsteller

‘Great leaders find ways to connect with their people and help them fulfil their potential’ (Steven J. Stowell)

Leadership is seen as vital to realising aspirations, achieving high-performing teams and creating positive cultures of care. The challenge, however, lies in practicing leadership in ways that are authentic and draw out our own and others’ potential. And just as with geese flying in V formation, leaders aren’t just the ones at the top – it’s essential to develop each person’s leadership potential. With its strong emphasis on more equal relationships, learning processes, a shared life-space and ethics as first practice, social pedagogy has important implications for leadership at every level of an organisation. To help existing and potential leaders better understand how they can integrate social pedagogical principles in the way they lead, we’ve developed a 3-day course. Until now we have only run this as part of social pedagogy projects with bespoke organisations, but given the very positive response and substantial interest we’re now also opening the course to individuals to join.

Here is what you can expect: over the 3 days you will get plenty of opportunities to explore how key principles in social pedagogy translate into leadership, what this means for you, your team and wider organisation, and, most importantly, how social pedagogical leadership can benefit children, young people and their families. The leadership course is facilitated over 3 consecutive days using a variety of learning methods to make social pedagogical leadership become real – through experiential learning activities, group discussions, theoretical inputs, reflection and action planning on how you can develop your leadership.

If you’re interested in the course, please download our brochure, which includes the registration form for our next social pedagogical leadership course in Edinburgh on 16-18 November. Alternatively, you can stay informed by joining our emailing list, liking us on our Facebook page or getting in touch with any questions via email.

Group of Canadian geese flying i V formation over frozen lake

SPDN event at Camphill School Aberdeen and Robert Gordon University – summary

Posted on August 9, 2016 by Gabriel Eichsteller

With its warm community spirit, peaceful environment and holistic approach to living together, the Camphill School Aberdeen is easily one of the most inspiring social pedagogical settings to visit. Participants at the 14th SPDN were able to feel this with every fibre as the Community hosted our summer event of the Social Pedagogy Development Network together with the Robert Gordon University. Over 24 hours, we explored social pedagogy across the lifespan, with keynote presentations by Kate Skinner, Janine Bolger and Patrick Walker, Fiona Feilberg, and Claire Cameron, as well as lots of interactive parts that made this a very memorable event: experiential workshops in Camphill settings, group activities including a performance by the newly initiated SPDN band, time for open space conversations, networking, and thematic workshops. A more detailed summary of the event, including presentations and photographs, is available here. And if you’re not already signed up to our SPDN emailing list, please feel free to register for future updates here. We’ll soon announce details of the next SPDN event in winter and look forward to seeing many of you there!

Organisers SPDN Aberdeen