21/12/2018

Members of the IESF participate in a round table on family education at Saint Tikhon University in Moscow

The event was co-organised by the Department of Social Work in the Russian university, and the IESF. 

The director of the Institute for Advanced Family Studies, Montserrat Gas, and the associate director for teaching programmes, M. Pilar Lacorte, attended a round table on “Training as a tool to support the family”, held on 4 October 2018 in the Vladimir Room in the main building at Saint Tikhon University, a Christian university belonging to the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow. 

The Institutes’ activities and programmes were presented at the event and special mention was made of the Postgraduate degree in Marriage and Family Education, which this year will be taught in Russian for the first time. During the conference similar positions on both sides became clear in relation to the need to provide information to young families so that they can better understand their role as a family. The situation of the family in Europe was also presented in general terms, as well as the serious problems of stability it now faces. 

At the event, Dr Gas described the lines of research being undertaken by the IESF, through the IsFamily Santander Chair, and the Joaquim Molins Figueras Foundation-sponsored Childcare and Family Policies Chair in relation to family solidarity. 

Tatyana Valeryevna Zaltsman, head of the Department of Social Work in the Russian Federal Tax Service, said that in Russia social assistance is mainly provided to dysfunctional families. In that sense, there is a tendency to talk only about family problems, therefore the concept of “family” becomes associated with problematic situations. 

Viktor Viktorovich Grigorenko, an Associate Professor in the Administration Department of the Moscow State Pedagogical University, and a former student on the Postgraduate degree in Marriage and Family Education programme, talked about the importance of the programmes in the Institute for Advanced Family Studies and how this training helped him both as a father and in his family guidance work. 

Representatives of both two universities recognised that it is necessary to rediscover the beauty of family, thereby reaching a shared conclusion. 

To provide continuity to this meeting, a decision was made to work together through the creation of joint training programmes.  Students from the Department of Social Work and Youth and students from the Faculty of Education at Saint Tikhon University also attended this event.