Seeking Positive Collaboration between Pedagogy and Medicine: A Narrative and Phenomenological Inquiry

My doctoral research project aims to identify a context in which medicine and pedagogy can define collaborative processes for working together successfully. In Italy, there is currently little tradition of collaboration between these two fields. The context of my research is a therapeutic community for adolescents that is part of a hospital neuropsychiatric unit in Northern Italy . This community is managed by a multidisciplinary team, made up of psychiatrists, nurses, psychologists and educators. In my research project I set out to compare medical science and pedagogy because they share a common focus of interest: humans and their “being in the world”. Namely, medicine cares for physical wellbeing, while pedagogy focuses on the formative aspect. I have specifically chosen to compare pedagogy and psychiatry, given that psychiatry is responsible for the treatment of mental illness, but must intervene in the formative process of the individual to orient or correct it. Using participant observation and interview methods, I will focus on how the different professionals narrate the context and on how they personally perceive collaboration. This narration may bring about new learning regarding the collaboration between medicine and pedagogy in the context under study. The ultimate goal of my research is to explore a context in which pedagogy and medicine can “live” together: working with the same subjects using different care paradigms, but within a single shared programme.