From “frontier educators” to the current role of professional educators in community development

Abstract

This essay focuses on the role of professional educators in community development as a particular expression of
educational work in the field of social pedagogy, with regard to the recent reforms. This perspective is considered
as an evolution of the professional role, starting from the activity of “frontier educators” who, in the second
post-war period, worked to restore relations of solidarity and social cohesion; other stages of this path are
represented by the “street educators” phase and, recently, by the transformation of the welfare system from the
traditional redistributive model into a new participatory approach. According to the paradigm of “collective
intelligence”, the real resilience in our communities will depend not only on the availability of funds, but also
on how actively community workers will promote solidarity, and on collective accountability.