Rethinking the Expertise of Education, Health, and Social Care ProfEssions in the XXI century. The dilemmas and challenges of practice amongst epistemic primacy, deontic authority, and the person-centered normative framework (RE-EHSCAPE)
Since the 60s, education, health and social care professionals (EHSCP) have been facing a radical change in the cultural model informing their practices. In the name of the client/patient/user/person-centered approach, the shared decision-making model, the normative orientation to empathic care as well as the pedagogical “participation and empowerment” turns, the pressure for “accountability” progressively eroded the domain of “epistemic authority” and the epistemic gap between ‘professional’ and ‘lay vision’ decreased. This Galilean moment in care and education policies and practices produced over time a capillary hybridization of the client’s and the professional’s epistemic and deontic rights and the progressive foregrounding of the individual’s needs and choices as the benchmark for educational, health and social care policies and practices. Recent phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy, parents’ pressure in pediatric and school settings, the reported “loss of authority” by schoolteachers or the difficulty educators experience in bridging their expert voice and the local cultures of families, index to what extent EHSCP have been affected by this cultural change and point to some emerging challenges.
Sixty years after the rise of what was, at the time, a radical new paradigm legitimated by organizational concerns and moral imperatives, the project REEHSCAPE theoretically and empirically investigates the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of the ‘person-centered turn’. Particularly it addresses its overlooked sides and possible unanticipated consequence, namely the crisis of expertise, concerning EHSCP addressing 0-11-year-old children and their families. Focusing on these professionals is paramount as they work as “social antennae”: bridging the families’ private “small cultures” and broader socio-cultural models of children’s health and well-being, they do “educational work” on an everyday basis, manage the epistemic and deontic tensions related to the negotiation of expert vs experiential knowledge, and constantly balance the ‘client-centered approach’ with a professional orientation toward the needs and standards of the larger community. Adopting an innovative interdisciplinary approach, the research develops along three pillars: 1) a historic-theoretical study retracing and critically examining the social history and consequences of the “person-centered turn” in care professions; 2) an empirical study adopting a multi-method, multi-site research design to investigate how EHSCP perceive and manage the epistemic dilemmas and deontic challenges they face in their everyday work experiences and interactions; 3) an applied study developing practice-oriented training formats and guidelines to foster EHSCP’s capability to rethink their expertise within the contemporary person-centered cultural framework.