scholarly journals Creative mentoring: A creative response to promote learning and wellbeing with children in care. A service developed by Derbyshire County Council’s Virtual School

Author(s):  
Claire Parker

This paper offers some insight into the benefits, impacts and challenges of the ‘creative mentor’ role. It links to a social pedagogy framework, supporting practice, and draws on creative mentors’ work with children and young people living in care. It aims to inform professionals and teams around a child about the transforming nature of working with creativity – beyond the obvious external experiences. Included are descriptions of how feelings of being ‘stuck’ can be shifted through engagement in a creative activity, moving a young person to a place of wellbeing, held within the safety of a trusting relationship. It is hoped that the reader will have a better understanding of the various stages of the creative mentoring process, and will reflect on some of the challenges faced when working with vulnerable children and young people who may have suffered early trauma. This paper describes how beginning work and establishing the relationship can be nerve-wracking for both, and how the skills of creative professionals bring a new dynamic into the work. Vignettes and discussions highlight the similarities in the creative mentor’s practice to that of the social pedagogue, and reflect on concepts and processes. We hope this work will encourage more discussion about the creative mentoring experience, to add to our community of learning around creative practices in care and in education.

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-86
Author(s):  
Sergii Boltivets

Among the threats and dangers of the future, our duty to the younger and future generations is to develop the instincts, feelings and self-preservation of children and young people, who by their very birth suffer from inventions, conflicts and crises inherited by all previous older generations. The dominants of future self-preservation are in the mental development of children and youth, the main of which we consider mental abilities, development of feelings and especially - a sense of empathy for all living things, as well as - the imagination of every child and young person. her own life and the lives of others. Our common methodology should be to understand that the social world is not simplified, but complicated, and we have a duty to prepare our children and young people to solve these complications.


2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 348-350 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Kemp

Robyn is a UK-qualified social worker who has a deeply held passion for, and some 30 years of experience working with disenfranchised and/or vulnerable people and children and young people in care. She has a strong interest in social pedagogy and residential childcare both operationally and strategically. Since 1995, she has been in a variety of management positions and has developed and delivered training, conferences, workshops and consultancy on children's social work and social care for the statutory, voluntary and independent sectors. Her work has aimed at improving both the experiences and outcomes for children and young people in or on the edge of care and raising the profile of those affected by, and working within, the social work and social care sectors.


Author(s):  
Nicki Moore ◽  
Nicole Chavaudra ◽  
Mohammed Jakhara ◽  
John Marriott

Improving outcomes, particularly those relating to educational attainment for children in care, remains a ubiquitous challenge for local government. Some European countries use social pedagogy as a conceptual framework to improve the outcomes for children. As part of its aspiration to embed a holistic mind-set for staff and carers working with children, Derbyshire County Council has practiced social pedagogy within its children’s residential homes since 2010, resulting in positive changes for staff and young people. In 2013 the University of Derby was commissioned to scope the content of the Council’s workforce development approach, to explore the idea that social pedagogy is a promising approach, not just in children’s homes but also in wider services. The scoping project included surveys and interviews with a range of children’s services workers, including those from social work, child and family support, residential and fostering services. The research identified that, where social pedagogy underpins the activities offered to vulnerable children and those in residential care settings, the outcomes for these groups are improved. There is a growing appetite for a programme of workforce development in social pedagogy, however any such programme should be inclusive and offered at different levels. Furthermore, the principles and concepts should be embedded in the existing roles of a range of practitioners working with children and young people. Ongoing research with Derbyshire’s children’s services workforce will contribute to a growing body of evidence, which supports the development and application of social pedagogy to improve the experiences of children and young people in the county.


Author(s):  
Pat Petrie ◽  
Peter Moss

This article explores possible relationships between education and social pedagogy. It begins by examining in more detail the theory and practice of social pedagogy, and the profession of social pedagogue widely known in Continental Europe but much less so in the Anglophone world. It then explores some different meanings of education, before considering in more detail the concept of Bildung and its potential for interconnecting education and social pedagogy. It is argued that the relationship between social pedagogy and education depends on the meaning attached to education; and the article ends by considering some implications – for schools, other settings for children and young people, and for their workforces – of choosing a close relationship between education and social pedagogy.


2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 219-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Surel ◽  
Sarah Douglas ◽  
Andy Finley ◽  
Alexandra Priver

Guest Editors' NoteAs a holistic way of working with children and young people to develop their learning and wellbeing, their inter-and independence, social pedagogy is widely practised across many European countries. While the ways in which it is practiced will differ — depending on the cultural context and setting — there are also common threads that connect the social pedagogic traditions found in several countries. Hämäläinen (2003) suggests that ‘social pedagogy has a certain perspective of its own [which] cannot be reduced to a set of simple pedagogical methods, but should be understood as an educational orientation in which the world, people, society, social problems and social work are observed through “social pedagogical” glasses, as it were’ (p. 76).


Author(s):  
Rebecca Anthony ◽  
Graham Moore ◽  
Nicholas Page ◽  
Gillian Hewitt ◽  
Simon Murphy ◽  
...  

Abstract Purpose Studying mental wellbeing requires the use of reliable, valid, and practical assessment tools, such as the Short version of the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (SWEMWBS). Research on the mental wellbeing of children in care is sparse. The current study aims to: (1) examine the unidimensionality of SWEMWBS; (2) assess measurement invariance of SWEMWBS across children and young people in care compared to their peers not in care; and (3) investigate the latent factor mean differences between care status groups. Methods We used data from the 2017 School Health Research Network Student Health and Wellbeing (SHW) survey, completed by 103,971 students in years 7 to 11 from 193 secondary schools in Wales. The final data include a total of 2,795 participants (46% boys), which includes all children in care and a sub-sample of children not in care who completed the SWEMWBS scale fully and answered questions about their living situation. Results Confirmatory factor analysis supported the unidimensionality of SWEMWBS. The SWEMWBS is invariant across groups of young people in foster, residential and kinship care compared to children and young people not in care at configural, metric and scalar levels. Findings from latent mean comparisons showed that young people in care reported lower mental wellbeing than their peers, with those in residential care reporting the lowest scores. Conclusions Findings suggest that SWEMWBS is a valid scale for measuring differences in mental wellbeing for young people in care similar to the population.


Author(s):  
Mariya М. Odintsova ◽  

A lot of modern psychological studies point to the inextricable link between the real and the Internet space in the context of the process of socialization of the individual, structuring the life scenario, in particular in the field of professional development. However, the integration of various predictors associated with the characteristics of the modern labor market and, as a consequence of career planning, life scenario is a methodological problem. To solve it, research design was applied, based on a combination of theoretical and empirical, quantitative and qualitative analysis. The aim of the study was the desire to clarify the role of the content of social networks in the formation of the life model of the professional sphere in the personal life space. It is suggested that the components of life models in the field of the profession broadcast on the Internet may be similar to the constructs already available in young people. The empirical research was carried out in several stages. At the first stage, semantic and content analysis of more than 170,000 posts over the past 2 years from the 20 most popular communities of the social network was carried out using special computer programs. The results of the analysis were the identified features of the components of the life model in the field of the profession, broadcast in the information space. At the second stage, the peculiarities of personal ideas of young people about building their own professional path, as well as the perception of the experience of parents’ professional activities were investigated. The sample consisted of 166 respondents; the average age was 21 years. The results obtained confirm the assumption about the similarity of the characteristics of the components of life models in the field of the profession, presented in the posts of Internet communities and the characteristics of the constructed life scenario in the field of the profession by the respondents themselves. The ideas about professional life and its further construction are probably associated with intergenerational transmission and traditional family values, the personal interests of a young person, his/her abilities, as well as with the tendencies learned in the process of intergenerational transmission of values and certain ideas in the circle of contemporaries presented on the Internet.


Author(s):  
Judith Good

In 2011, the author published an article that looked at the state of the art in novice programming environments. At the time, there had been an increase in the number of programming environments that were freely available for use by novice programmers, particularly children and young people. What was interesting was that they offered a relatively sophisticated set of development and support features within motivating and engaging environments, where programming could be seen as a means to a creative end, rather than an end in itself. Furthermore, these environments incorporated support for the social and collaborative aspects of learning. The article considered five environments—Scratch, Alice, Looking Glass, Greenfoot, and Flip—examining their characteristics and investigating the opportunities they might offer to educators and learners alike. It also considered the broader implications of such environments for both teaching and research. In this chapter, the author revisits the same five environments, looking at how they have changed in the intervening years. She considers their evolution in relation to changes in the field more broadly (e.g., an increased focus on “programming for all”) and reflects on the implications for teaching, as well as research and further development.


Author(s):  
Kenneth McK. Norrie

Aftercare, the duties owed to young people after they leave formal care, has always been an inherent aspect of the child protection process in Scotland, perhaps more so indeed in the early days when the assumption was that child protection necessitated the permanent removal of the child from the parent’s care. Early aftercare obligations were primarily around assistance in finding employment for young people when they reached school-leaving age, though managers of reformatory and industrial schools also had obligations to supervise the young person who had left their care for three years or until their 21st birthday. Latterly, education and training grants were made available, as were other forms of financial assistance. Finally, the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 imposed on local authority the obligation of “continuing care” towards young people who had previously been “looked after” by the local authority, and on a range of public bodies to act as “corporate parents” to such care leavers.


Author(s):  
Diego Silva Balerio ◽  
Paola Pastore

Many young people in South America experience repeated conditions of economic, social, and cultural exclusion, with low rates of secondary school completion and high unemployment exposing them to social violence. Yet, they are also the driving force for change in the region; their creativity is a transformative power. This chapter proposes a pedagogical reflection on the learning process and on social and educational participation. Each young person’s individual experiences and the knowledge they acquire in institutions and diverse social contexts are a platform to develop cultural promotion opportunities that produce the conditions to build a future project. Social educators practice one of the social tie professions that help generate bonds with culture, institutions, and other people, whereas educational action relates each young person to common cultural heritage. Social pedagogy faces the challenge and responsibility of creating strategies and cultural transmission methods for all youth, becoming a political action that fosters equality.


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