ABSTRACT
Mette is 51 years old. Married, with two teenaged children, she lives in a small town in northern Denmark. She has a degree-level diploma in social pedagogy, and has worked in residential establishments since she graduated at the age of 26. She lives a short drive from the residential institution where she worked as a ‘group pedagogue’ for the last nine years. More recently, she has become ‘team leader’ for a staff group of six pedagogues. Between them, they care for a ‘living group’ of eight young people, aged between five and 14 years; the institution has three living groups and a small school for residents, all on the same site. Mette works 37 hours a week, covering day and evening shifts; she no longer works overnight or at weekends. She always works with the same group of staff and young people, although pedagogues and young people in different living groups all meet regularly, and in her role of team leader she has regular meetings with other team leaders and the head of the institution. As team leader, Mette spoke of her pedagogical responsibilities for the staff group and for the young people. She felt the pedagogic education had been very important, for her and her colleagues, in ‘using myself as a person and my professional knowledge and skills, that I give something, that I make a difference’. Mette valued her institution’s emphasis on education and development, saying ‘we try to keep up, to improve and become more competent. It means every day is different.’ Part of her work involves supervising pedagogy students on placement in the institution, and she observed that they have to learn that ‘to like the children is not enough’. During her time working in the institution, Mette had taken a number of additional training courses, ranging from a ‘fabulous’ one year University course in organisational pedagogy, to a football coaching certificate. After 25 years of work in residential care, Mette
commented that she will probably move on to work as a training consultant in a few years time, ‘before I end up as an old person here’.1
