Elevhälsans vägledning : En fallstudie om specialpedagogiskt arbete

Sammanfattning: Milic Pavlovic, Ljiljana (2021). Student health guidance. A case study about special educators' work. Master degree in Special education, School development and Leadership, Faculty of Education and Society, Malmo UniversityThe purpose of the study is to investigate how consultants from the Central Student Health's specialist team support compulsory school educators for early school years in relational competence when they meet students with neuropsychiatric disabilities. The study means to illustrate opportunities and obstacles that arise during the support process. The relational pedagogy and the special pedagogical perspectives are theoretical frameworks for the study. The study is about four consultants at a centrally organized student health institute and therefore the case study methodology is being used as the motivated research approach. The study focuses on the consultants' perceptions of their work as well as descriptions of opportunities and obstacles that arise when they support educators in the field of relational competence towards students with neuropsychiatric disabilities. The study also intends to show how the support is organized, implemented, and evaluated and how it contributes to the teachers' competence development in the meeting with students with neuropsychological disabilities. Since the study focuses on the consultants' perceptions, semi-structured interviews are the chosen method. The results show that the consultants perceive their support as a combination of different types of consultations and tutorials, with an appearance of the collaborative consultation (Sundqvist & Ström, 2015). The consultants identify the schools' explicit focus on the categorical perspective as the biggest obstacle to their supporting work. At the same time, the consultants identify several opportunities that can be created through successful consultation. One opportunity is the change of perspective to the relational perspective where, a permanent development of relational competence in pedagogical contexts and opportunities for collegial learning and development has been identified. It could gradually lead to a broad impact on all students' learning and development, regardless of whether students have a disability or not. The consultants also see an opportunity for consultation from a preventive perspective which in combination with education in neuropsychiatric disabilities could improve schooling for students with neuropsychiatric disabilities. There are variations in the consultants' perceptions of their work that can be interpreted based on the concept of inclusion and equivalent education, something that could create both opportunities and obstacles for the school's compensatory mission. The organizing of consultation can be presented as a timeline, in a chronologic order from the beginning to the end. The timeline extends throughout the process, from the application for seeking support to Central Student Health to the conclusion of the support work. It also contains a continuous evaluation that follows the consultation process with adaptations to the educators' needs. The consultation process has been identified as a circle where each consultation opportunity creates opportunities for new initiatives in the practical work in the classroom, but also modification or confirmation of the implemented initiatives. In this way, the effects are created at all three levels, namely conclusion level, teacher level and student level. These effects contribute to learning and development for all parties involved