PARTICIPATORY
AND HERMENEUTIC EVALUATION FOR THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF
EDUCATORS: A PSYCHOANALYTICAL AND SOCIO-EDUCATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
This
abstract aims at presenting part of the results obtained by the
Grundwig Project called ''EDUEVAL'', Evaluation for the adult education
staff'', funded with the EU support. Such project started at the
beginning of January 2014 and it was oriented towards the exploration of
the complexity of the Evaluation regarding the Education of the adult
people, in order to define a curriculum suitable to train professionals
during the initial and in-service training. Many activities, from
research to workshop to pilot training course, have been developed using
different methods, both qualitative and quantitative. A special
workshop has been implemented using the psycho-social method and it was
dedicated to the participatory and hermeneutic evaluation of the work of
the educators. Participatory evaluation (Cousins, Chouinard, 2012) is a
kind of evaluation that actively involves participants looking for the
meaning of their actions, practices and procedures. It consists in an
hermeneutic evaluation inasmuch this research of the meaning goes deeply
into the hidden dynamics when using psychoanalytical approach. The
workshop has been made in a large Socio-educational Cooperative Company,
that works with disabled people. Fifteen educators participated in the
partecipatory and hermeneutic evaluation workshop using
psychoanalitycal approach (Hinshelwood, 2013, Hollway, Jefferson, 2013).
The paper will describe the theoretical and methodological foundations
of the approach used and it will express the analysis of the
psychosocial dynamics and the reflections that went through the
evaluation experience. The coordinator of the workshop asked to the work
group to evaluate its educational quality in the work with disabled
people, their families and their colleagues. He asked to reflect about
the way of functioning as an educational staff, what kind of
pedagogical theories and models they adopted when in conctact with the
final users, if the group was open to the entrance of new colleagues or
final users, what kind of power of membership they were able to take on,
what kind of relationship with the leadership they used to establish,
etc. Through psycho-social approach (Clarke, Hoggett, 2009; Reid, West,
2014) it was found out the difficulty to start reflecting about
themselves as competent and active professionals because they were not
used to self-evaluate their work and their way of functioning as an
educational staff. Usually, they were exposed to external evaluations,
that looked at the system of procedures followed by the Company but it
did not look deeply through into the psychosocial dynamics and the
complexity of the educational relationship with the final users. The
conclusion underlines that, in order to fully understand a situation
and verify the quality of an educational experience, it is necessary to
sum up different kinds of evaluation. In our Edueval Project we speak of
a Triangulation Method of Evaluation, stating that three typologies of
evaluation are needed to completely understand a context: the context
evaluation, the self-evaluation, the external evaluation. The
self-e