Dr. Joan Forbes, Reader in the School of Education, University of Aberdeen, and Dr. Elspeth McCartney FRCSLT, Reader in Speech and Language Therapy at the University of Strathclyde have a new paper published in the journal: Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 2015 Issue 1 (DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2013.871235 ).
The Discourse paper emerges from a commitment to understand the practices that shape contemporary views of children’s needs and services, a project that crosses disciplinary and professional boundaries. The article examines key children’s social and educational policy, Getting it Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) and a recent report on the future of teacher education in Scotland, the ‘Donaldson Report’. The paper calls for universities involved in child practitioner education to look beyond single traditional disciplines. Universities, it is argued, must respond to the contemporary children’s sector, which is characterised by interprofessional, inter-agency ‘joined-up’ practice and ‘joined-up’ thinking, via a commitment to increased attention to interdisciplinarity and interprofessionality in child practitioner education.
Joan Forbes and Elspeth McCartney’s new article is the most recent in a series of research collaborations and outputs on inter/professional education and practice. Their overall research programme is designed to understand child sector co-practice relations and what changing co-practice demands mean for the education of children’s sector practitioners; and to provide insights on how transprofessional practice might better serve children and families, and so serve to ameliorate educational, cultural and societal in/exclusion for young people. The programme studies are both empirical and theoretical, applying cultural politics analysis and social theory and seeking to develop innovative research methodologies.