Images and symbols: resources for narrating educational work within the Italian Mental Health Services

In the current paper, I draw on the preliminary outcomes of my doctoral research to reflect on the use of images and symbols to narrate educational work in the area of Mental Health. My PhD project sets out to explore how medical and pedagogical knowledge interact during professional practice. The psychiatric area, as a specific medical sector, seems to offer a particularly meaningful context for this line of enquiry. I have therefore designed an empirical study, involving two Mental Health units, with the aim of exploring the interaction between medical and pedagogical interventions in two different contexts in which health and educational professionals carry out their daily practice as a team. The research design is informed by a qualitative approach (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000), drawing specifically on a hermeneutic-phenomenological method (Van Manen, 1990). It also follows a case-study strategy (Yin, 1994). The data was gathered using a range of instruments: ethnographic observation (Angrosino & Rosenberg, 2011), semi-structured interviews (Atkinson, 2002; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), the practice of collage-making (Biffi, 2010; Butler-Kisber, 2010) and the researcher’s diary (Mortari, 2007). The data was analyzed following a hermeneutic-phenomenological model (Van Manen, 1990). NVivo software was used to support the analysis. In the current paper, I specifically focus on the profile of the education professionals, in relation to the images that they themselves chose during the collage-making session to narrate their own work.