Participatory Teaching and Research: a Remote Fieldwork Initiative

This paper presents a participatory teaching and research initiative carried out at the University of Messina. As part of a project entitled “Professional social practices in local services: making knowledge explicit”, several experimental work groups called “Participatory and situated teaching and research boards” were set up in 2018. On the one hand, the “boards” produce new knowledge and expertise in social services; on the other, they communicate with future practitioners in university classrooms, using a teaching method based on participation and co-construction of knowledge. This paper will deal specifically with the process of knowledge co-construction that developed in the “Drug Addiction board”, in which practitioners from drug addiction services (SerD) and therapeutic communities, service clients, students and academic scholars were directly involved in the construction of a virtual co-teaching lesson for university students. The paper will present the lesson content prepared by the roundtable participants for a specific theme: primary prevention.