Supervision: an object of inquiry and a challenging meta-reflective practice to strengthen educators’ professionalism in contemporaneity

The dynamic transformations of contemporaneity make an impact on educational events and new emerging needs, by increasing their complexity. Therefore, social educators perceive the opportunity to adopt a multidisciplinary approach, in order to extend their framework of analysis to include a range of possible interpretations, meanings and forms of intervention. In order to move in this direction, multiple meta- reflective practices are in use in socio-educational services: counselling, training, coordination, supervision and research processes. Educational professionalism needs supportive reflective tools that stimulate the exercise of self-assessment skills, increase awareness of personal and professional limits and resources, doubts and resistances, disclose thoughts and values to which educators refer in their practices. Supervision is a challenging object of inquiry: the constant intersection between personal and professional dimensions, problems and reflections involved in social work require both a psychological and a pedagogical approach. They are differently focused on individual and collective feelings surrounding an educational experience, or on educators’ agency and the coherence of actions within educational design and planning frameworks.