TCELT research seminar - 3 April 2024

Helga Fasching is an Associate Professor at the Department of Education, University of Vienna, Austria. She led the five-year Research Project “Cooperation for Inclusion in Educational Transitions” Project Website; she is the scientific director of the Advanced Study in Psychotherapy: Systemic Psychotherapy/Systemic Family Therapy (University Master course), Postgraduate Center (PGC) at the University of Vienna. Advanced Study in Psychotherapy: Systemic Psychotherapy/Systemic Family Therapy; she is a Psychotherapist (systemic family therapy), in her former work she was a leader of a Vocational Inclusion Project for young People with Disabilities.

Her Research Focuses are: Inclusive transitions from school to work; Collaborations between young people with disabilities, their parents and professionals (participative transition planning); Vocational participation experiences of persons with intellectual disabilities; Intersectional research/research on inequality (disability, gender, migration and family background); Qualitative transitions and family research (systemic approach); Systemic concepts in inclusive educational, psychosocial, and therapeutic fields of work; Qualitative research methods (ethics in qualitative research, narrative/intensive interviews, grounded theory, longitudinal studies; Participatory research, transdisciplinary research. Email: [email protected]

In this presentation, I show a participatory method to involve young people with disabilities in research by using reflecting teams. In the course of the longitudinal project “Cooperation for Inclusion in Educational Transitions” on the transition from school to work of young people with disabilities, we examined ways to increase the participation of these people in the design and content of reflecting team sessions. In this regard, the reflecting team, more often used in a counselling context, was adapted to provide a special form of group discussion for participatory research with young people with different disabilities. The presentation describes and discusses the adaptations that were made in the reflecting team research process. These adaptations included giving these young people, rather than a researcher, a role as moderator, inviting increased visualization within the reflecting process, and using an outsider-witness approach. Finally, we discuss the potential of the reflecting team for our participatory research with young people with disabilities.

This presentation starts with a short overview of the research context, which includes the theoretical framing and the research design of the project. I then continue with a discussion of participatory research methodology and show how and why I use the reflecting team as a special form of group discussion for our participatory research with young people with different disabilities. Next, I describe the process of reflecting on team sessions with young people with disabilities. We then reflect on the method of the reflecting team for participatory cooperation and describe the adaptations which were made (young people as moderators, increased visualization, and using the outsider-witness approach). Finally, I discuss the potential of the reflecting team for our participatory research with young people with disabilities for participative cooperation.

References

Fasching, H., Felbermayr, K. & Todd, L. (2023). Involving Young People with Disabilities in Post-school Transitions through Reflecting Teams. Methodological Reflections and Adaptions for more Participation in a Longitudinal Study. In: International Journal of Educational and Life Transitions, 2(1): 19, pp. 1–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/ijelt.44 (peer reviewed).

Fasching, H. & Felbermayr, K. (2022). Participative cooperation during transition: experiences of young people with disabilities in Austria. In: Journal of Social Inclusion, special Issue “Challenges in the school-work-transition, 10(2), https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v10i2.5079www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/5079 (peer reviewed).

Husny, M. & Fasching, H. (2020). The consulting of executive practitioners in participative cooperation: how professionals view the inclusive transitional process of youths with disabilities in Austria. In: European Journal of Special Needs Education, 7:2, 206-219, https://doi.org/10.1080/08856257.2020.1862338 (peer reviewed).