Il valore della ricerca partecipata nel lavoro sociale: l'esperienza dei tavoli di co-didattica | The value of participatory research in social work: the experience of co-learning tables

This contribution aims to share the field experience carried out as part of the project professional social practices in territorial services: making knowledge explicit, proposed by the Cospecs department of the Messina University. 
The article describes the innovative training path experimented in the “participatory and situated co-learning and research boards”, involving researchers, social workers from public institutions and non profit organizations, students and people housed in services. The small communities of practice that have been generated have “legitimized the participation of subjects with heterogeneous experiences and knowledge” (Lave and Wenger, 1996), the “boards'” created contexts in which to support the “natural” learnings of professional communities (Schön, 2006; Merizow, 2003; Fabbri, 2007) and address the inherent and in many ways contradictory and conflicting complexity of such contexts. Contamination with the praxis-theory-praxis methodological approach, which belongs to social workers, has generated virtuous relationships that reduce the distances between knowledge thought  of as “legitimate” and that placed as “illegitimate” (Pellegrino, 2006).
Beginning with a description of the processes of situated and participatory university training and teaching (Pellegrino, 2016; Lave and Wenger, 2006; De Bartolomeis, 1976), the article focused on the views, reflections and expectations that characterize the personal and professional experience of two public service social workers who participated in the “mental health board” and the “immigration board”.