Towards interprofessionality in developing family mediation in Finland

Abstract

Collaboration crossing professional and organizational boundaries is promoted, but also considered difficult and uncalled for. The aim of this study is to advance the comprehension of inter-professional collaboration on boundaries as a resource for learning and change. I examine and trace the initial shapes of interprofessionality and learning in two separate learning networks of a project researching, developing and learning family mediation in Finland. The naturally occurring data consists of transcribed audio-taped talk between practitioners (e.g. social workers, family counsellors, psychologists and judges) at the beginning of their collaborative work. The qualitative analysis detected communicative patterns, disruptions and dialogical learning mechanisms. The results interpreted through Cultural-Historical Activity Theory show that although the two quite similarly composed learning networks were given the same tasks, they differed on emerging learning mechanisms and unfolding dialogues. If collaboration is intended to be inter-professional and lead to change, there is a need to actively create shared tools, such as models, that enable transformative dialogue. For social work education inter-professional collaboration poses a challenge: how can education concurrently promote both learning the boundaries of social work and learning how to inter-professionally cross them?

Keywords:

• Boundary crossing
• dialogical learning mechanisms
• discursive tools
• inter-professional collaboration
• polycontextual expertise

Acknowledgements

The writer wants to thank Professor Synnöve Karvinen-Niinikoski and PhD, Senior Researcher Ritva Engeström at the University of Helsinki, and PhD Vaula Haavisto for invaluable comments during the process of writing this article.

Notes

1. A learning network for long-term interaction is established for the primary purpose of generating learning events and creating innovation potential. Participants with a sufficiently broad diversity of expertise and a shared interest in adequately similar development issues meet as learners to contribute expertise and ideas allowing the others to utilize and benefit from them. All the participants are learners (Alasoini, 2011; Bessant & Tsekouras, 2001).

2. Engeström, Engeström, and Kerosuo (2003) observe that the objects are not the same as goals that are primarily conscious, relatively short-lived and finite aims of individual actions. The object is a heterogeneous and internally contradictory, yet enduring, constantly reproduced purpose of a collective activity system (here—learning networks) that motivates and defines the horizon of goals and actions (Engeström et al., 2003).

3. Hereafter, when I refer to these dialogical learning mechanisms, I spell the concepts beginning with a capital letter.

4. Fasper (abbreviation for the Finnish words for facilitative family mediation: fasilitatiivinen perhesovittelu) was initiated and organized by the Finnish Forum for Mediation, a non-governmental organization dedicated to promote mediation as an alternative conflict resolution in for example workplaces and schools. The project was funded by Finland’s Slot Machine Association, whose funding operations are governed and monitored by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health (MSAH), and realized in partnership with and scientifically supervised by faculty in the discipline of social work at the University of Helsinki.

5. Hereafter, I use only the term divorce for short. With the term I mean both separation and divorce and separating/separated and divorcing/divorced parents. The focus of the project described in this article was not on the legal aspects of separation and divorce but on the changing roles in parenthood.

6. The following phases constitute the ideal-typical cycle of expansive learning: questioning and analysing the present activity, modelling the new activity; experimenting; implementing; consolidating; evaluating and reflecting (For a presentation of the model and studies in which it has been used, see e.g. Engeström & Sannino, 2010).

7. In Finland child welfare supervisors (or officers) are social workers or lawyers by training and they work in municipalities. They register parents’ agreements on the custody and maintenance of their children after divorce. Additionally, they administer the confirmation of paternity.

8. The translations of the excerpts are all my own.