Polifonie incorporate. Formare alla riflessività sistemica nella comunità per minorenni

Abstract

This paper offers a frame to teaching reflexivity in Residential Child Care (RCC), a workplace featuring increasing yet recent professionalization, daily relationships and constant interaction with different agencies and professionals involved in the child protection system. Education in RCC takes place within an institutional, organizational and relational context with explicit and implicit presuppositions, dilemmas, and power dynamics. Thus, we identify systemic reflexivity as a required competence to cope with this complexity and act in a transformative way: an integrated, collective, and operational way of thinking, apt to support change and empower educators’ professional identity. The international literature review highlights the features of systemic reflexivity as a multi-layered process involving the individual professional, the working team, the dominant epistemology, and the power of good narratives. These are the ingredients of a training practice, here presented, designed to promote these competences in settings of both higher and workplace education.