Protecting Children: Reflective Practice for Future Educators

In Italy, Bachelor’s degree courses in Education Sciences prepare future educators who can work within public, private and third sector organizations in the planning, implementation and evaluation of educational interventions. A curricular traineeship of 250 hours is foreseen, preceded by a 50-hour training course on critical situations in educational contexts. During their traineeship, students participate in supervision meetings in small groups, moderated by a professor. To prepare for the meetings, each of them is asked to write a critical incident based on their field experience. The analysis of critical incidents is a training strategy that helps people to clarify their assumptions and to understand, through comparison with different perspectives, the value assumptions that guide their own and others' behaviors. During the meetings, the critical incidents are analyzed by the group starting from three key questions: what is the problem being narrated? Who should take charge of this problem? What could/should be done? In the trainees’ narratives collected over the years there are some episodes of child maltreatment in school and educational services. It is essential for a future educator to be able to reflect on the distorted educational conceptions which, on the one hand, generate these phenomena and, on the other, prevent them from being eradicated. The paper, starting from the analysis of critical incidents reported by the trainees, focuses on the reflective practices necessary for future educators to build awareness of what maltreatment is and how to prevent, identify and manage it in educational contexts.