Why I Struggle to Explain What a Developmental Educator Does
Why I Struggle to Explain What a Developmental Educator (DE) Does
Why This Question Is Difficult To Answer
One question I have always found surprisingly difficult to answer is:
“What exactly does a Developmental Educator do?”
You’d think after studying and completing a degree, working in the field, writing reports, attending professional development, and talking about it for years, I would have a simple answer ready to go.
Yet somehow this question still catches me off guard.
Not because I don’t know the answer… If anything, I think the problem is that there are too many answers and not enough words I can generate for it on the fly.
When people ask what a DE does, they’re usually asking a straightforward question and expecting a straightforward answer.
And as you may have realised by now, that wasn’t quite what they got .
For me though, the question feels connected to something much bigger.
- It’s connected to disability.
- It’s connected to support work.
- It’s connected to my personal growth.
It’s also connected to feelings of confidence, anxiety, belonging, relationships that were formed, and the experiences that shaped who I am today.
That’s why I often pause when somebody asks me about my profession.
My brain immediately starts going in ten different directions at once. And before I know it, I’ve somehow turned a simple question into an entire blog post.
And, that also contributes to why my preferred way of explaining and communicating is in writing.
Writing gives me time to sit with an idea, unpack it, and follow the different threads that come to mind. And to be honest, some of the things I’ve learned about myself only became more obvious to me after sitting quietly with them for a while and giving myself the time to reflect alone.
For many years, my answer to that question was often much simpler than it should have been.
Sometimes I would answer very briefly.
Other times, I would simply send people a brochure from a workplace I had previously worked at and let that do the explaining for me.
That often felt much easier and safer than trying to explain something that my brain tended to take in ten different directions and that felt far more complicated to me than it appeared on the surface.
When people asked what a DE did, I could usually give a professional answer after rehearsing it for some time in my head.
I might talk about development, participation, inclusion, capacity building, person-centred practice, and supporting people to live meaningful lives within their communities.
That part wasn’t too difficult.
The difficulty often came when people asked the next question:
“What do you offer?”
“What makes you different?”
“How is what you do different from support work?”
“How is it different from what an OT does?”
Maybe that’s a topic for a different blog post because, despite some overlap, that isn’t really what this reflection piece is about.
Being a bit of a people pleaser, for a lack of a better word right now, I often feel pressure, and the first thought that jumps into my mind is – this is when a person wants me to give an impressive and reassuring answer. However, my instinct is usually to go with the honest answer that feels most reflective of who I am.
I think that’s part of why I find these direct questions difficult.
I often know what answer people are expecting to hear, but my brain usually takes me somewhere more honest.
Especially when I was new to the field, those questions could leave me second-guessing myself. Part of that was because I didn’t yet feel I had enough experience behind me to fully trust my own answers.
And if I’m being honest, sometimes they still do.
And not because there aren’t differences between each role I have experience with but because I have never experienced a clear separation between my Support worker self, Mentoring self and my DE self.
When I think about the qualities that guide my work, many of them have remained remarkably consistent over time. I have:
- The same curiosity about people.
- The same desire to understand others.
- The same belief that everyone deserves opportunities to participate, belong, and be recognised for their strengths.
Because those values existed before I became a DE, it can sometimes be difficult for me to identify where one role ends and the other begins, as I just don’t look back and see two completely different versions of myself.
I see the same me, with more knowledge, experience, perspective, and confidence than before.
That is probably why I found myself defaulting to answers like:
“It’s just a title.”
Or:
“It’s not really that different from what I did as a support worker or mentor.”
There is another reason too.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog or someone who feels like an underachiever.
What I mean by that is, any person who doubts themselves, feels left behind, may feel limited or believes they have less to offer because their life hasn’t unfolded in the same way as somebody else’s.
I think part of that comes from recognising a little of my younger self in those situations.
There was a time when I compared myself to others based on what I had achieved, what I hadn’t achieved, and where I thought I should be in life.
I know how easy it is to overlook your current strengths when you’re focused on what everyone else seems to be doing, how fast they seem to be moving forward, and the belief that everyone else somehow got there a little easier and faster than you did.
That may be why I can be sensitive about placing too much weight on a title when relating to and connecting with others who are still learning to trust their own abilities.
Because of that, I’ve never felt particularly comfortable with the idea of “selling myself” or placing too much weight on titles, qualifications, or achievements.
Not because I don’t value my degree or the profession. I clearly do.
But I have never believed that a qualification alone determines a person’s worth, potential, or capacity to grow.
Some of the most capable, insightful, and compassionate people I have met didn’t need a degree on the wall to prove it too.
What I particularly struggled to explain earlier was that, over time, the degree, the work, my lived experience, my personal growth, and the values I already held had all become tangled together.
And the more I reflected on what a DE is to me, the more I realised that many of the things I value most in my work existed long before I became a DE.
The Journey That Led Me Here
Even as a child, I was often the person who noticed when someone seemed left out, uncomfortable, isolated, or unsure of where they belonged because I experienced some of those same feelings myself.
I’ve always been curious about people and their wellbeing.
I’ve always enjoyed listening to people’s stories, perspectives, interests, and experiences.
Over the years, people have often told me that they enjoy talking to me, and I suspect part of that comes from taking the time to genuinely listen.
I don’t think it is because they think I had all the answers, but because I’m interested in understanding another person’s perspective and learning about their world.
At the same time, my younger years were also shaped by anxiety, perfectionism, self-doubt, and periods where I felt stuck.
Anxiety isn’t simply about feeling nervous.
At different points in my life, it looked like avoiding assignments and procrastination because the thought of starting something felt overwhelming.
Sometimes it looked like overthinking things until I talked myself out of starting altogether.
Other times, it looked like being far harsher on myself than I would ever be towards somebody else in the same situation.
These days, my anxiety tends to show up differently.
It’s less about avoiding assignments and more about the pressure I place on myself to do things well, meet my own expectations, and feel confident that I have genuinely done my best for the people I support.
What I didn’t realise at the time was that growth was also happening quietly in the background.
Not through some dramatic breakthrough.
Just through living life, gaining perspective from others and continuing to give things a go.
When I eventually started working as a support worker, I didn’t suddenly stop being anxious or self-conscious.
I still worried about how I came across.
I still questioned myself.
The difference was that my attention gradually had somewhere else to go.
Instead of being consumed entirely by my own thoughts, I found myself focusing more on the people I was supporting.
Their goals.
Their interests.
Their challenges.
Their successes.
One of the biggest changes wasn’t that I became less anxious.
It was that my attention gradually became less focused on myself.
And maybe the shift for me was spending less time alone analysing myself and more time helping other people work towards things that mattered to them.
Support work got me moving.
Out of the house.
Into the community.
Into forming new relationships.
Into situations that challenged me and helped me grow.
Not because support work or mentoring fixed my anxiety or perfectionistic tendencies.
It didn’t.
But it gave me opportunities to participate in life despite it.
The participation came first.
Then the experience followed.
Then confidence followed.
Then more self-trust followed.
And eventually, perspective followed too.
Support work and mentoring others played just as important a role in my development as my university studies.
Many of the skills I rely on today weren’t all developed in a lecture room.
They were developed through showing up, building relationships, making mistakes, learning from them, and continuing to grow from experience.
There was also a time in my life when I thought my path would look very different (and I am sure many many people can relate to this).
In my early twenties, I began studying psychology, a subject I still find fascinating today.
At that stage of my life, however, I was struggling with anxiety, perfectionism, self-doubt, and a level of paralysis that often made it difficult to move forward with it.
For a long time, I viewed dropping out and trying new things through the lens of what I hadn’t achieved.
Today, I see it differently.
I don’t see someone who lacked ability.
I see someone who was exploring and doing the best she could with the capacity, understanding, and resources she had at the time.
Developmental Education arrived at a time when I was ready for it.
It provided an opportunity to continue learning, continue growing, and continue building confidence in my own capacity.
It helped what felt like a detour become an important part of my own journey.
Another reason DE resonated with me was that it encouraged me to think differently about people and their experiences while broadening perspectives I had already begun exploring through my own interest in psychology.
Over time, it also encouraged me to reflect more deeply on my own lived experience.
As someone who would later receive a diagnosis and who had long suspected there may have been more to some of my own experiences with anxiety, differences, and the way I processed the world, I found myself relating to many of the people I was supporting in ways I hadn’t expected.
Alongside that understanding came a genuine sense of connection and belonging that had often felt difficult to find during my school years.
Not because my experiences are identical to everyone elses.
But because I understood what it felt like to question yourself, doubt your own abilities, or feel different from the people around you.
In many ways, DE helped me better understand disability, development, participation, barriers, and inclusion through a broader lens.
At the same time, it helped me view myself through a more compassionate one.
While Developmental Education didn’t create my values, it did complement them and give them somewhere to grow.
It gave me language for things I had felt but couldn’t always explain for myself.
It helped me make sense of things I had observed but didn’t fully understand.
And it encouraged me to see some of those qualities not simply as personality traits, but as strengths that could be developed and applied in meaningful ways.
One of the things I appreciate most about Developmental Education is that it encourages us to see the whole person.
Not simply a diagnosis.
Not simply a support need.
Not simply a goal.
But a person with their own strengths, challenges, relationships, aspirations, and lived experiences.
People do not live inside reports, diagnoses, recommendations, or support plans.
People live in everyday life.
And believe me, I do my best to capture those complexities whenever I write reports.
But even the most thorough report is ultimately just a snapshot.
A person’s life is always bigger than the paperwork.
When I reflect on my own journey, I can see that I am not the same person I was ten years ago.
I have more confidence.
More experience.
More perspective.
Most importantly, I trust myself more.
Because life has given me enough experiences, challenges, successes, mistakes, support, and encouragement to realise that I am often more capable than I give myself credit for.
If there is one lesson I seem to keep learning, it is that I often underestimate my own growth.
When you’re living your life day by day, it’s surprisingly easy to miss how much you’ve changed.
I’ve often found that I’m standing too close to my own growth to see it clearly without someone else there to point it out.
The interesting thing is that I see the same pattern in many of the people I support.
They are often so focused on what they still can’t do, what remains difficult, or where they want to be that they struggle to recognise how much progress they have already made.
Sometimes it takes somebody else noticing it first and reflecting it back to us before we are able to see it for ourselves.
And sometimes that reminder can make all the difference.
That has certainly been true for me.
What Developmental Education Means to Me
I think the biggest reason I struggled to answer such a simple question is that I wasn’t really struggling to explain a profession.
I was struggling to separate the profession from the journey that led me there.
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably started to see why.
When people ask what a Developmental Educator does, I can explain the profession.
I can talk about development, participation, inclusion, capacity building, advocacy, and supporting people to live meaningful lives on their own terms.
The professional answer was never the difficult part.
The difficult part was explaining what Developmental Education came to mean to me.
For me, it became more than a qualification, profession, or title.
It became an opportunity to continue growing into the professional I wanted to be while also continuing to grow as a person.
It provided a framework for understanding people through their strengths, experiences, relationships, environments, opportunities, and barriers rather than reducing them to a diagnosis or a list of challenges.
Over time, I realised that this way of thinking didn’t just influence how I viewed the people I supported.
It also influenced how I viewed myself.
The social lens at the heart of Developmental Education helped me become more compassionate towards my own experiences and recognise that growth is rarely as simple or linear as we would like it to be.
If I had to describe what Developmental Education means to me, it would be this:
It gave me the opportunity to become the professional I wanted to be at the pace I needed, while supporting other people to work towards lives that are meaningful and shaped by what matters most to them.
And in doing so, it also helped me develop a greater understanding of myself.