The Supervision of socio-educational practitioners: an integrated model

This paper presents findings from an Action Research project conducted for a doctoral degree. It tests the specific effects of educational supervision through the approach of Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987). Supervision was offered to various groups: university students of a degree course in Education Sciences, social workers without a degree and practitioners, pedagogues and social professional educators. The interaction with them progressively shaped and improved a model proposal of social educational supervision practice. This paper gives an overview of the methods used and of results of the participative research process. It allows conclusions concerning the possibility of using the AI framework for providing supervision in social educational settings.