The debate on the epistemological identity of social pedagogy: a personalist proposal

This paper offers a reflection on epistemological identity and pedagogical paradigms of social pedagogy (SP) as an academic discipline. We will take into account the different ways in which the expression ‘social pedagogy’ is used internationally in the context of a wider science of social work. This article is structured as follows: an overview of the debate about the academic identity of SP, the Italian way to define SP, and a conceptual proposal presenting SP as a theoretical-practical science. In the final part, we will illustrate the difficulty of the search for pedagogical paradigms that characterize the different approaches to SP, and we will conclude with a theoretical proposal of a personalist conceptual framework that is in dialogue with the complexity of the present time