Innovative Practice and Interventions for Children and Adolescents with Psychosocial Difficulties and Disabilities

Angie Hart · Elias Kourkoutas

Jun 2015 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

About this ebook

This book engages with a wide spectrum of questions and topics related to children’s, adolescents’ and families’ difficulties, as well as to epistemological, meta-theoretical, taxonomical, and intervention issues. Particular emphasis is given throughout the book to discussing and suggesting various alternative methods and practices of promoting the potential and capacity of children, families, and schools to deal with various personal and contextual risks and adversities. Most of the contributions brought together in this volume highlight the psychosocial and community and especially school-based and child-centered paradigm focusing not only on the treatment of children’s deficits, but mainly, and above all, on strengthening and sharpening their social, emotional and learning skills and on promoting child, family, and social-school resources and resilience. Integrating various innovative or traditional techniques in a wider psychosocial and resilient inclusive perspective is one of the most promising approaches to childhood disorder and disability. This book presents these fundamentally important issues within the context of up-to-date research on vulnerability and resilience that helps strengthen family and child-school relationships, and will enable professionals, teachers, and parents to deal with a plethora of difficulties and risks in childhood and adolescence.

About the author

Elias Kourkoutas is currently Professor of Psychology and Special Education, and Head of the Psychology and Special Education Laboratory, at the Department of Primary Education at the University of Crete. He received a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Department of Psychology at the University of Liege, Belgium. He taught for several years at the Technological Educational Institute of Larissa, Greece, as well as in many European Universities, as Visiting Professor or Invited Professor. He has published a series of books in Greek and many articles in peer-review journals in English, French, Spanish, and Italian. He has published a book in English on childhood behavioral problems, titled Ecosystemic Psychodynamic Interventions within the Family and School Context, and also co-authored, with F. Erkman, Interpersonal Acceptance and Rejection: Social, Emotional, and Educational Contexts.

Angie Hart is Professor of Child, Family and Community Health in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Brighton, UK. She is also the Academic Director of the University’s Community University Partnership Programme. Professor Hart teaches professional courses for health and social care practitioners, and undertakes participatory research into inequalities in health and social care in relation to children and families. She is the co-author of Resilient Therapy: Working with children and families, and has published many books and articles on issues related to resilience, inequalities, Communities of Practice, and disability. As well as being a university academic, Professor Hart is a community practitioner with many years of experience in working at the frontline in child and family mental health. As the adoptive parent of three children from the care system, she has much experience herself as a user of health and social care services in both the voluntary and statutory sector. She co-founded boingboing, a social enterprise dedicated to resilience research and practice development (www.boingboing.org.uk).