Reactions to increasing global complexity seek to manage ambiguity and uncertainty through narrowing the range of possible pedagogical responses. This is evident in attempts to codify professional knowledge in competency or standards frameworks and to systematise practice through ‘evidence-based’ manuals. At the same time, scholarship on learning and teaching identifies the key quality of the contemporary professional as a capacity to cope with epistemological uncertainty and complexity, which, together, result in an existential experience of ‘strangeness’ (Barnett, 2004).

Attempts to simplify, codify and prescribe professional knowledge and, through this, professional practice, pose real problems for social pedagogical work. Social pedagogical knowledge is not abstract, overly scientific but is situated, contingent, fluid and, crucially, it incorporates the experiential knowledge that derives from the lives of those with whom social pedagogues work. In social pedagogy, professionals might be thought of as ‘experts in the everyday’ (Cameron, 2014). Our work is a self-in-action endeavour, which, by its nature, demands ontological and reflexive examination of how we ‘are’ with one another.

This special series seeks to draw out what might be involved in such everyday expertise and how social pedagogy equips professionals to meaningfully respond in complex and uncertain situations. We are looking for papers that begin to draw out social pedagogy’s knowledge base and how this might be defined and contrasted with ‘evidence-based’ or manualized approaches to practice. 

Publication date: From August - December 2020. 

---

Guest Editor

Sebastian Monteux, School of Applied Sciences, Division of Health Sciences, Abertay University and NHS Tayside, UK.
Prof Mark Smith, Professor of Social Work, School of Education and Social Work, Dundee University, UK.

---

Article list 

Editorial

---

Research article

---

Conceptual critique

---