Professionalization and Collaboration: Innovative Education in Highly Specialized Societies

This article ventures to illuminate how a significant amount of Nordic welfare work is being carried out in collaboration between professional teams, consisting of social workers, social educators, early childhood educators, teachers, psychologists and other health personnel. Interprofessional working is a developing research field, internationally and in the Nordic countries. The authors discuss how new educational programs at university colleges can improve interprofessional practice contexts by sustaining new methods for collaboration between professionals with distinct backgrounds in diverse areas of expertise. During the last decade novel methods conceptualized as Professions Laboratories (PROLAB) and Ethical Circles (EC) have been developed in collaboration between researchers at Danish and Norwegian universities and university colleges, in order to create new explorative learning methods to strengthen welfare professionals in their education and work praxis.