On 9 – 11 May this year, FESET holds a seminar on the process of going from being a student to working as a professional: “From student to professional: learning by acting and reflecting”.

In the process of transition from student to professional worker, at least three milestones are faced by students, educators and researchers: transition from college/university to practice placement, integration of acquired analytical and practical competences to overall learning process at college/university and transition from college/university to professional work placement.  There are many actors who can facilitate or burden the process: the student, college/university teacher, tutor, supervisor, researcher, employer, and other stakeholders.

And there are many ways to learn. The seminar focuses on learning by acting and reflecting using the well-known triangular figure head-heart-hands: how this principle could support and enrich learning in times of changes? How do we relate analytical and practical knowledge in never ending changes of social life?

Read more about the seminar here.

New Public Resistance
Recent months have seen a range of protests in different Western countries. In Greece, Spain, England and now Wall Street, the streets have been full of people protesting, showing their resistance: resistance towards the distribution of resources; resistance towards the lack of democracy in modern decision making; resistance towards structural and institutional changes. But how is this resistance to be understood? And which educational, institutional and pedagogical lessons can be drawn from these resistance movements? This is the conceptual framework for the next CONCRIT conference in Barcelona, May 2012.

The conference will take place in Barcelona starting at 6pm on Friday 18 May and finishing on Sunday 20 at 3pm. It is a participatory conference and workshops will develop according to participants’ own ideas, interests, short inputs that they want to make, group work and any visits that they care to make. The conference will be outdoors in a public space and the venue is yet to be announced. There is no cost for participation at the conference. You can start your participation now by logging on to our Facebook site where you can begin developing themes and identifying issues that you would like to discuss, share or contribute to the conference.

CONCRIT is a network of practitioners, students, educators, researchers, employees in local authorities, NGOs, trade union activists, artists and others with an interest in and knowledge of children, young people and adults. The network is concerned with their welfare and the educational and social policy and practice that affect them.

Read more about the conference and CONCRIT here.

For those of you working in child and youth care services I want to highlight the international network of Child and Youth Care, CYC-Net. If you sign up to CYC-Net’s discussion groups you will receive posts and comments on a wide range of topics and issues related to working in child and youth care while you can also post comments and questions and start a discussion yourself.

As such, the network is a great place to meet colleagues from other countries online and share your thoughts, questions and experiences. For example, today there is a post from a woman working at the university of Essex calling out for papers that draw on current projects or recently completed work using oral history and related methods, which address the themes of disrupted and traumatic childhoods. Another post enquires about a certain link to a lecture by Henri Maier. Other topics will relate more directly to everyday practice.

To read more about the Child and Youth Care Network and sign up for their discussion group, please read here.

It is with great delight that we can now present a written version of the presentation that Rosa Maria Torres gave at the AIEJI world congress in Copenhagen, May 2009.

For those of you who were there, you will remember this great presentation about how the tradition of social education is different between Europe and Latin America and among the countries within each region and how the social educator is also a political agent.

Rosa Maria Torres has established a blog about education and this is also where you will find her AIEJI presentation.

SENDART is an international competition organised by CEESC, the Association of Social Educators in Catalunya.

The competition invites everybody to create and submit an image that conveys how social educators are agents of social change through the work they do.

To enter and read more about the competition, read here.

For any questions regarding the competition, please send an email to Virginia Gotor: sendart@ceesc.cat.

Dear friends and colleagues,

As 2011 is coming to an end it is time to look back at the year behind us but even more important to look at what lies ahead of us.

In 2011 the AIEJI document “Working with persons with developmental disabilities – the role of the social educator” was finalized and published here on the website. It has since been translated into several languages and has proven to be an important document that social educators around the world can use in their everyday work.

The task that lies ahead for 2012 will be to produce a similar document on the role of the social educator when working with children and youth at risk, in relation to the UN Convention on the rights of the Child. I am looking much forward to this work and hope the end product will turn out as interesting and useful as this year’s document.

When we had the AIEJI congress in Copenhagen in May 2009 the world was in a state of chock after the global financial collapse. One would have hoped that more than 2½ years later the situation would be different. Unfortunately it seems the situation has only gotten worse. It is during times like these we must remember what we do and how we make a difference in other people’s lives. The profession of social educators is based on humanism, it is based on the relation human to human, how we communicate and show respect, how we give space for people who are not like ourselves and how we embrace the many differences humans have.

Every single day social educators around the world turn words to action and every single day they are in contact with people whose lives have been affected by the crises, the rising unemployment rates, the cut in public spending and other developments that all result in a lack of resources for those who need them most. In a world where many things seem to be reduced to a matter of money, social educators are the human factor and we must fight against the general tendency to marketize our services.

Merry Christmas and happy New Year

Benny Andersen, President