Storie maestre: comporre un archivio per prendersi cura di chi cura

This article deals with some practices of research and education which have been conducted with a group of researchers and social workers in Verona in 2015. The education practice aimed to enhance unexpressed professional competences. The practice was gender sensitive and based on the development of embodied knowledge, which recognizes the relationship between work activities and private life. The aim was to analyze the competences which social workers gathered through professional experiences while performing patience care services, in order to ameliorate the procedures of assessment of the professional practices. While professionals are usually supposed to gather the individual stories and to objectify them, our group has focused on the professional’s experiences and biographies. The relationship with some of the users of the social services raised some core issues. The practice was successful in enhancing the awareness of the professional’s social relevance and geopolitical positioning, a deeper understanding of reality and the need to revise the traditional procedures. We developed specific writing techniques, which have lead us to the archive of teacher-narratives and the development of practices which take the perspective of the ones who care. In this perspective the analysis of the narrations of the care relationship has allowed to define the sense and meaning of the relationship itself, it triggered a continuous flow of correlations of information, which is necessary for a proper understanding of complex situations. The narration of the stories extracted from the professional biographies lead to the activation of fundamental paths, in order to focus on the acquired (but still unexpressed) competencies and to share a process of self-assessment regarding the tools and the practices. The proposal of specific techniques of narrative composition has conducted us to the creation of a file of teacher stories, which are neither the story of a single user, nor the story of the professional. With teacher-stories, we intend the story of a relationship which is situated in a relational and institutional context and became active from the elaboration in a common space of research. It is this common space that allows the reflexive path to be impersonal. The teacher-story points at some possible practices beyond the procedures, since it does not focus on the research of the identities of the other person, but it underlines the importance of being in a geopolitical dimension that connects the stories in a necessary manner.

Il contributo delinea le pratiche di una ricerca-azione partecipata che mirava a fare emergere le competenze taciute delle professioniste del lavoro socio-sanitarie. Una volta riconosciuta la specificità di genere, la ricerca ha messo in circolo la valorizzazione dei saperi incarnati e situati e riconosciuto il nesso tra dimensione lavorativa e personale.