Advancing Cross-Professional Work in Education 2020

This workshop has been rescheduled to 12 – 16 juli 2021

Throughout their education, children develop in multiple ways: intellectual, social, emotional, physical, and civic. These various domains of growth and development are complex and interwoven, as are the conditions that aid or impede children’s progress. Schools form the most significant context for children’s learning and development outside the family. Within schools, teachers bear the primary responsibility for pupils’ progress; their responsibilities extend well beyond the teaching of academic content to encompass other aspects of pupil growth and well-being. However, teachers increasingly find themselves challenged by the growing cultural, linguistic, ethnic or racial, and economic diversity of the pupil population. Teachers lack the capacity and resources to address such challenges alone, no matter how well prepared to teach or how experienced they may be. This context has therefore produced new forms of interdependence between teachers and a range of other professional specialists who may be employed directly by the school or by other community human service organizations. These specialists include psychologists, social workers, health professionals (nurses, speech and language specialists, mental health specialists), and more. Yet the character of these interdependencies typically remains masked by the silos in which professionals are prepared.

The broad aim of the workshop is to envision a next-generation agenda of research and practical innovation in professional education across the human services professions concerned with the education, development, and well-being of children. To pursue that aim, the workshop will convene social science and education researchers together with professionals from education, school psychology, social work, and the health professions. Together, the participants will (a) develop and document a comprehensive and specific grasp of research and program innovations that address emerging professional interdependencies that bear on the education, development, and well-being of children; (b) propose an agenda of research on cross-professional preparation and cross-professional practice in education, capitalizing on conceptual and methodological advances in the social sciences; (c) Identify new means of promoting and organizing innovation in programs of professional preparation; and (d) develop examples of professional preparation strategies that might be implemented and tested in one or more of the programs and institutions represented by the participants.