Partnership and pedagogy in child and family health practice

This book explores how health professionals work in partnership to support families with young children, based on ethnographic research. It gives a flavour of daily life and routines on the Residential Unit of Karitane (Sydney), and explores how a stay there can have a profound effect on families. Partnership requires professionals to negotiate the focus, nature and pace of support with families, developing skills and capacity in families rather than solving problems for them. The book asks how professionals learn from and about the families they support, and describes collective choreographies of learning and knowledge sharing among staff. Child and family health practice is understood as pedagogical work, in terms of how professionals scaffold parents’ and children’s learning. Pedagogy is described as a bodily practice, and linked to notions of challenge and praise. Notions of learning and pedagogy elucidate how partnership is enacted in practice, making specific reference to the Family Partnership Model. The concept of transformative events is used to understand how ordinary events are transformed into something extraordinary with lasting pedagogic effects.