The Role of Parents in Cooperative Relationships between Parents and Professionals

Abstract

<p>It is usual for teams of educational, medical and care-giving personnel to support the educational progress of children who required special needs teaching. Team members can include teachers, special educators, physiotherapists, learning disability nurses, auxiliary nurses and unskilled workers. Professionals are employed in a number of different environments including school systems, respite homes and activity centers. The article describes a working method whereby professionals and parents cooperated in a team around children who required special needs teaching. The primary focus was to increase the understanding of communication, since various functional impairments make mutual comprehension more complicated. Over the course of one-and-a-half years individual video recordings were made of interactions between the child and specific team members in a number of different settings, including school, home and respite centre. The group as a whole came together regularly to view, analyze and reflect on the video data. We discovered, discussed and attempted to resolve the barriers to productive teamwork. In addition, this work was supplemented by in-depth interviews with all participants, and an analysis of the children’s educational records. An important finding was that the project revealed a mutual lack of recognition that parents and professionals have different attachments, experience and knowledge about the pupils’ resources and strategies in communicating with the outside world. Another finding is that the different professions relate to different perspectives and paradigms, which in turn affect what they consider important aspects of how to support the child. The article also identifies experiences with various barriers to progress, and discusses ways of tackling them.

<p>This working method may stimulate ideas for further research into themed work, where the knowledge of close relations may supplement the knowledge of the professionals involved, and contribute to improving the quality of the education provided.

<p>In our experience the availability of DMB in NICU has improved and standardized the use of breast milk and DM for premature babies, using internal protocols and a breastfeeding support practice that has been consolidated over the years.