There is a quiet crisis in the social and medico-social sector across Europe. Not one that makes headlines, but the kind that accumulates – in resignation letters, in recruitment failures, in the growing exhaustion of directors whose professional identity has been destabilised by rapid societal change. SCOPE – Support Change Of Paradigms for Life Balances – takes this seriously. So do I, as learning designer and researcher on the project.

What makes SCOPE methodologically distinctive is that it refuses to separate research from learning. The core of the project is a set of longitudinal Research-Action Spaces – stable multidisciplinary groups that meet repeatedly across the project cycle, bringing together directors, trainers, researchers, and sociologists from France, Portugal, Italy, and Germany. These are not focus groups. They are generative spaces where practice-based knowledge is co-produced, made explicit, and progressively validated.

Methodology and learning theory

The theoretical grounding is rich and deliberate. The design draws on Participatory Action Research (Lewin; Bradbury et al.) as its overarching paradigm, with Schön’s Reflective Practice informing how practitioners are supported to examine and articulate their own tacit knowledge. Vermersch’s Explicitation Interview techniques are used to surface action knowledge that experienced managers carry but rarely name – the embedded, embodied know-how that conventional training rarely reaches. Wenger’s Communities of Practice frames the community-building dimension: the goal is not just a training module, but a sustained network of practitioners capable of learning together beyond the funding cycle.

Methodologically, the work uses semi-structured collective conversations, iterative SWOT analyses, expectation and satisfaction questionnaires, and cross-national validation cycles. My role involves both designing these research instruments and translating what emerges into learning materials – a training module, a MOOC toolbox, and a freely accessible knowledge base – that are genuinely grounded in what participants actually experience rather than what theorists assume they need.

The hardest design question SCOPE keeps asking me is one I don’t think has a clean answer: how do you design learning for people who are themselves expert, time-poor, and institutionally pressured – and who have good reason to be sceptical of training that doesn’t understand their world? The answer this project is working toward is: you start with their knowledge, not yours.