Remy, Cécile; (2024) Looking For The ‘Rich Child’ In Residential Child Care Workers’ Everyday Practice: A case study investigating the use of the ‘image of the Rich Child’ in a team of residential care workers’ justifications for the decisions they make in the everyday. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The subaltern positioning – or othering- of children in care is well documented. One of the arguments for adopting social pedagogy as an approach to professionalising the children workforce in the UK was pedagogues’ awareness of the impact of constructions of ‘child’ on professional practice. Moss and Petrie, (2002), inspired by the Italian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) educator Loris Malaguzzi’, suggested working from an ‘image of the rich child’ to counter negative constructions present in British services. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how Moss and Petrie’s suggestion can, if at all, transform this subaltern positioning and positively counter existing constructions of ‘child’ in the everyday practice of Residential Child Care workers in England. To do this, I first highlight a disconnection in Malaguzzi, Moss and Petrie’s work and much of the literature about RCC in England: the split between imagined, preferred futures and current state of affairs. In the former, the sector invests hopes and attempts to improve quality, while in the latter, negative constructions and deviations from the preferred future are highlighted. Many years of reform and improvement have not significantly changed this for the better. I argue that a post-Vygotskian theoretical framework is adequate to investigate the transformative potential of the image of the rich child in RCC workers’ everyday practice because it articulates the relationship between ‘images’ and material practice, and how practices can either incrementally change or socially reproduce the status-quo through attention to mediation and ideal images as defined by Ilyenkov. I describe how Change Laboratories can support those theoretical principles to be applied to workplace settings. The analysis of the everyday situations produced through an adapted process of change laboratory demonstrates how the statutory categories of ‘child in care as other’ and the subaltern positioning of children in care invisibly mediate the everyday activity of RCC workers, in a way that shapes the interpersonal relationships between young people and adults in the case study home. If one is to take transformative actions to counter these negative constructions of ‘child’, one needs to understand how professionals use different types of knowledge to carry out their work, and how social pedagogy’s ideas of value-based practice is tied with neo-liberal notions of individual responsibility.

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