Educational support, empowerment, and its risks: The correct voice of support?

In this paper I focus on what is called ‘‘educational support,’’ as this is understood in the Netherlands and the Flemish-speaking region of Belgium. My purpose is to demonstrate how the dominant contemporary conceptualization of educational support, because of the very language in which it is expressed, fails to aptly express the professional educator’s contribution to the educational process and invites the idea that the professional educator should assume an attitude of abstinence. Two risk-related issues stand out in this analysis: first, the position of the professional educator seems to entail an evasionof the risks that inhere in defining oneself as an educational expert; and, second, there is the risk that parents’ voices, under the current conceptualization of educational support, are being appropriated by a societal discourse hooked on efficiency. I argue that the professional educator must speak — that is, contribute his or her own voice and embrace the risks of venturing it — in order to elicit voices (e-vocation) that might otherwise remain inarticulate or disabled under the pressure of the discourse of efficiency.