Enhancing Competencies in Contexts: Complexities in Residential Child Care

The 5-country project Empowering Residential Child Care through Interprofessional Training (ERCCI) was initiated in 2018 to explore core competencies as well as deficits in RCC training and develop standards toward increased professionalization. This 2nd paper of the symposium explores concepts, methods and standards for training designed to empower professionals working in RCC. Our questions are: What conditions allow to express professional competency? What do we mean by “competence”? And what competences are considered relevant for RCC? Answers to these questions depend on perspectives (theory, epistemology, values, culture), but children have universal needs and rights: how can we be specific to child, culture and situation while guaranteeing effective action? Perspectives need to be recognised, transformed and integrated to sustain professional self-development. Transformative learning can be a basis for such an endeavour.

A critical systemic frame will be used to analyse literature on competences in RCC and to challenge the discourse of competence as individual, acquired once and for all, and possessed as a good, to forward a complex view, where competence is the result of entangled factors - individual, relational, organisational, situational - expressed in context, in the here-and-now of a concrete relationship with a child, but more often with an interacting group, where other adults and children, as well as non-human elements (objects, space, time, landscape) are involved. The art of participating to complex interactive environments is especially important for Residential Units, where the everyday dimension is so strong. Awareness of feelings and reflexivity are a part of it, but there is more than that. Knowledge of other cultures of care is an atout of the ERCCI project.