A situational ethics to Social Education

Most of the ethical approaches related to professional activities, among which Social Education is included, have been put into practice from the field of the so called professional ethics which are usually thought from functionalist and idealizing approaches usually associated with a certain group of principles and imperatives formulated as a guide for orientation for what professionals should do in their particular activities (deontological ethics) or, as it has been proven, with the justification of corporatisms which question the same rules related to the different behaviors existing in a profession and, therefore, their own de ontological code. This line of research of professional ethics as applied ethics has a lot of history and has been subject of attention for researchers of this kind of rationality which have as starting point general principles with universalist ambitions and which has very few opportunities of generating specific and real situations. Social educators in Spain have deontological ethics that are somehow defining the "ethos" of the Social Education profession. Our goal is to offer an interpretation of the ethics from less transcendent points of view and to aim for its practical side, building it from real situations and from relationship created by the social educators in the institutions where they work. We try thus, to change the current way in which this goes from the universal to the specific, applying principles and assumptions to go through it in the opposite direction, thinking about the ethical dimension of educational action in which social educators, altogether and interacting, use their abilities and competencies.