Abstract:

When we refer to mediation as an area and set of competences which are transversal to various professions, and as a hermeneutical philosophy, we assume the interpersonal and intercultural communication as a systematic interpretation of interests of the parties in an interaction and as the will of those involved.

In the mediation between different cultural values, the educator and social workers emerge as mediators between social groups and the most diverse public and private institutions, relying on a multi-topical hermeneutics for the realisation of the rights and interests of the groups and subjects involved in the interaction.

The purpose of the mediation process is to seek the autonomy of these groups and people, known today as empowerment.

If education should be an instrument to promote equal opportunities and an instrument to favour social justice, school should become a fundamental space to legitimize and strengthen values which structure the State which is, however, nowadays increasingly multicultural. In this sense school has to seek forms of intercultural translation as it not only reconstructs cognitive systems but also operates at the level of personal and group identity processes.
So, prevention, education and transformation versus resolution is a very important way to promote the empowerment of minorities. The main objective of this text is of an essayistic and pedagogical nature, trying to show, using examples of social workers and social educators who work with teachers in Portuguese schools, other ways of socio-educational intervention besides the action at the end of the line, at the end of the process. The main idea is to underline the importance of education as a process of (trans) formations throughout individual and social life trajectories, seeking autonomy, underlining the importance of prevention versus intervention that many ignore as fundamental for social and educational transformation, which implies thinking not from the social and educational problems and how to solve them, but, on the contrary, educating for its avoidance, educating for citizenship, for the social values how to live together and for an ethics of welcoming and intercultural coexistence.
We will illustrate this distinction with the use of social workers and social educators that we studied in their work in the school context, according to a comprehensive and interpretive methodology of ethnographic approach.
In terms of some results, Social Workers have, according to our study, more resolving concerns; Social Educators seem to be more concerned with a dialogical, mediating, empowering and preventive intervention and finally, therefore more transformative than properly resolving.

Keywords:

Education, prevention, resolution, mediation, empowerment.