Enhancing Student Awareness of the Importance of Full and Accurate Documentation in Social Work Practice

The paper describes a classroom assignment that was used to raise social work students' awareness of the importance of timely, clear, and thorough documentation. The assignment was devised in view of the great importance of quality documentation in social work, coupled with the reluctance of social workers to invest the necessary time and effort to produce it. The core of the assignment was for the students to examine and report on the documentation in two client files at their fieldwork agency. The findings obtained from the students' reports show that about a fifth of the 190 files that were examined did not contain various pieces of basic information about the clients and intervention outcomes, and that much of the information that was provided was unclear and unorganized. The students' written reflections following the completion of the assignment indicate that the assignment achieved its aim of elevating their awareness of the importance of quality documentation. The paper ends with a discussion of issues to consider in repeating the assignment in the future, based on the reflections of the students and their classroom instructors.     

The adaptation of East Asian masters students to western norms of critical thinking and argumentation in the UK

The paper explores the adaptation experiences of East Asian masters students in the UK in dealing with western academic norms of critical thinking and debate. Through in‐depth interviewing, students' perceptions of their learning experiences were explored, and stages in this adaptation process were identified, with various entry and exit routes. It was found that the majority of the students opt for a ‘middle way’ which synergizes their own cultural approach to critical thinking with those aspects of western‐style critical thinking and debate that are culturally acceptable to them.     

Teaching Up: The Intersection of Impression Management and Controlling Images for Black,Cisgender, Women Faculty

This is a qualitative study of Black cisgender women's faculty experiences using an interactionist framework. Relying on in-depth interviews, we explore the experiences of eight Black, cisgender, women, sociology faculty across the United States in various tenure and non-tenure roles at different institutions (community college, teaching college, and research universities). Participants engaged in a variety of impression management techniques to overcome implicit biases and controlling images that shaped their students', and their colleagues', perceptions. While women in our study had agency, they were limited in the ways they could present themselves, a phenomenon Deil-Amen and Tevis describe as circumscribed agency. Once women in our study had achieved seniority they were able to express themselves in culturally authentic ways. Theoretically, this study shows how interpretive sociology can overcome its theoretical limitations in dealing with race, and shows that the interactionist perspective is actually well suited towards discussing this matters in a meaningful way. We conclude by advocating for greater awareness surrounding the lived experience of Black, women faculty, especially by those who mentor and evaluate them.     

'Managing' disability: early experiences of university students with disabilities

Recent UK legislation, operational from December 2006, places a duty on all public authorities, including higher education institutions, to actively promote equality of opportunity for people with disabilities. The university studied here has a number of initiatives in place to develop good practice in this area, but how do students themselves experience that provision? Research about people with disabilities has sometimes alienated them by failing to reflect their own perspectives. This study, explicitly aimed at incorporating students' voices and using interview and video data, offers some insight into students' experiences of the aids and obstacles to an inclusive learning environment at one university.     

Practicing in the Uncertain: Reworking Standardized Clients as Improv Theatre

In this paper, I rework standardized client activities using improvisational methods. While standardized client approaches to teaching/learning interviewing skills have been proven to be effective in increasing students' competence, I suggest that enhancing these practices with the ideas and approaches of improvisational theatre provides opportunities for the creativity that characterizes advanced practice. Improvisational theatre's focus on spontaneity and intuition foregrounds three elements of practice. These include unconscious and emotional knowledge, the relational nature of practice, and the variability and unpredictability of the interview. Reframing standardized client activities through improvisational theory and practice offers students an explicit framework for making sense of simulations as creative, spontaneous spaces for learning.     

Understanding the Impact of Using Oral Histories in the Classroom

Oral histories are a powerful pedagogical tool in developing historical understanding and important learning skills simultaneously. Teachers use firsthand accounts of historical time periods and/or events to help develop students' sense of history. In addition to gaining historical understanding, students are able to bring history alive by capturing personal stories and connecting with individuals to better understand their experiences and point of view. The purpose of this interpretive case study was to explore in depth how classroom teachers can develop knowledge of the social studies by engaging students in collecting oral histories of local residents. In addition, this case study explores how these strategies impact students' perception of learning social studies and their historical understanding.     

Preparing Social Workers for Practice: Re-evaluating Student Learning Needs

Among the key developmental priorities that have been identified in the current process of reform taking place in social work in the UK is the need to improve social work students' preparedness to meet the challenges they will encounter in practice. This paper contributes to the current debate about this issue by reporting a research study that focused on final year undergraduates' experience of academic and practice learning and considered the impact of demographic factors, including age, gender, disability, previous experience and qualifications, on their perceptions of preparedness. The results indicate that students were satisfied with most aspects of preparatory teaching and learning. However, the findings also highlight areas in which students' preparation could be further enhanced, including their skills in dealing with conflict and managing risk. The results suggest that social work programmes should not overly depend on practice learning to prepare students to address the challenges presented by increasingly complex working environments and that educators need to work closely in collaboration with employing partners to ensure that the curriculum keeps up to date with the changing learning needs of practitioners.     

A Teaching Framework for Transformative Multicultural Social Work Education

Abstract

A major challenge in multicultural social work education is fostering meaningful learning experiences for students by matching educational methods and content to students' individual learning needs and characteristics. Building upon transformative learning theory developed by Jack Mezirow, this paper proposes a teaching framework for transformative multicultural social work education that addresses students' individual learning needs and characteristics. This framework uses the dimensions of cultural knowledge and cultural sensitivity to represent four potential stances of cross-cultural learning in students. The paper provides a detail discussion regarding the learning needs and learning foci of students at each stance, and useful teaching strategies and activities that enhance students' transformative learning process so that they develop integrative knowledge about self and others in a dynamic multicultural society from multiple perspectives.     

Expansion of psychiatric services to the community

This paper describes an experiential model for teaching final year social work students how to deal with feeling issues in practice. It focuses on the middle phase of intervention primarily, using an outside person role playing a client in a classroom setting. The aim of the model is to enhance the students' ability in learning advanced empathic skills.     

From Resistance to Involvement: Examining Agency and Control in a Playworld Activity

In the recent sociocultural literature, it is possible to identify at least three ways of understanding the development of individual agency in social practices: (a) through transforming the object of activity and through self-change, (b) through responsible and intentional membership, and (c) through resistance and transformation of the dominant power relations. This article puts these different perspectives in a dialogical relation to each other and examines the development of individual agency in the context of schooling. The problem of promoting student agency is that, although personal sense and motivation are crucial for learning and development, the need for control and order in classrooms often makes it hard for teachers to give space to them. To develop more meaningful educational practices, there is a need for a thorough understanding of the ways through which teachers and students deal with and momentarily overcome this contradiction in their classrooms and are able to enact or promote agency. The article introduces an empirical case study of Anton, a 7-year-old boy's participation in a joint narrative classroom practice. Anton's orientation and interest toward the narrative activity alters drastically during the spring, as does the teachers' understanding and attitude toward him. Moreover, in Anton's participation, all the three different formulations of agency just presented are visible and concurrently “in action.” The article creates conceptual and analytical tools for examining the potential that narrative learning settings provide for supporting children's engagement and development in classrooms.     

Multimedia Compact Disc: Play Therapy Counseling Skills

Multimedia compact discs have become an important part of counseling education. Many educators recognize the value of compact discs in training and methods of instruction. The purpose of this study was to develop an instructional compact disc and to survey counseling students' perceptions of the compact disc. Participants included 71 counseling graduate students from two universities in the southern part of the United States. Students viewed the compact disc and completed a survey to assess their perceptions of the compact disc. Overall students' perceptions were positive and they believed that the compact disc was a helpful tool in learning counseling skills.     

Students' dreams for the future and perspectives on resilience-building aspects of their lives: The view from East Greenland

This study explores how perspectives from students can increase knowledge of how teachers and school authority can support students in building up resilience as a response to social challenges in the community. A locally flexible methodology using structured drawings (including classroom observation), semi-structured interviews, and semantic coding and situated analyses in a case study in East Greenland provided the following results: The students' aspirations were mostly about getting an education and a job and becoming socially successful. The students' motivation for attending school and doing educational assignments often depended on the social interaction with their teachers, and the students requested more involvement in decision-making processes at school to create more meaningful educational practices. If schools are to support the processes of building resilience and motivation for education, schools should include students' perspectives and encourage students' agency by listening to what they have to say.     

Internet Use Among College Students: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

The author and associates surveyed 1,300 college students in classrooms at eight academic institutions to identify how the students' use of the Internet has affected their social or academic lives. Although the typical Internet-using student uses the Internet for 100 minutes per day, a small group of students use the Internet to a degree that interferes with other aspects of their lives. Most of them are men and are found among the hard science academic majors. Some ideas for dealing with this problem are suggested.     

Producing Family Problems: Organization and Uses of the Family Perspective and Rhetoric in Family Therapy

This article applies and extends literature on the micropolitics of trouble and family rhetoric perspectives by analyzing how therapists in a family therapy agency practicing the brief model used family rhetoric in defining and responding to client problems. Family rhetoric is the use of images of family (the family perspective) to (1) persuade others to one's preferred orientation to issues of mutual concern and (2) attribute identities to one's self and others. The article focuses on how the therapists rhetorically enacted and applied the family perspective in interactions with colleagues and clients to define and remedy client troubles. In general, troubles were defined and remedied by treating them as products of clients' family systems, defined as enduring roles, relationships, and perspectives. The therapists sought to remedy client troubles by initiating changes assessed as appropriate for their troubles and family systems. The article concludes by considering some of the implications of the findings and analysis for the sociological study of human service work.     

Family Phone Therapy in University Counseling and Psychological Service Centers: A Family Systems Approach

Abstract

This paper offers family phone therapy as a method for student mental health practitioners to overcome the obstacle of geographic distance between students and their families when family therapy is the treatment of choice. The issues of confidentiality, triangulation, diversionary conversation, and mixed communication, which present unique concerns when engaging in family phone therapy, are introduced and strategies to deal with them are discussed. A case example is presented to demonstrate the utility of family phone therapy in dealing with problems that students who use university mental health services can typically experience. Finally, implications of dealing with students' developmental tasks from an individual or family systems perspective are discussed.     

Why They Don't Come Back: A Clinical Perspective on the No-Show Client

Clinical writers love to publish their success stories. Treatment failures get shuffled to the bottom drawer. Perhaps this is why there is so little in the clinical literature about a problem so frequently encountered by the clinical social worker: the patient or client who never shows up or doesn't return. Why don't they keep their appointments? What are the most common dynamics? How much of the problem rests with the client and how much with the clinician or agency? What should be done when your client “no-shows”? When should you do it? This paper will explore these questions in an attempt to deepen the practitioner's understanding and management of this common clinical challenge.     

Agency and clientship in public encounters: co‐constructing ‘neediness’ and ‘worthiness’ in shelter placement meetings

This article seeks to develop our understanding of the agency of vulnerable groups who at first sight may not seem to have much agency in their lives. It explores the co‐constructed nature of agency in three Danish homeless shelters. Unlike earlier interview‐based studies, our research is based on naturalistic data drawn from 23 video‐recorded placement meetings. Using concepts from Goffman, we examine how versions of the neediness and worthiness of homeless people are negotiated verbally and bodily between staff and clients. We find that homeless people have to juggle two partly contradictory roles when they are given or take the roles of either a (active) citizen or a (passive) client. Clientship is actively negotiated by both parties and demonstrates the agency of homeless people: they can collaborate with (as clients) or challenge (as citizens) the staff’s attempts to formulate solutions to their troubles. We further examine how the professional ideology of client centredness affects the meeting between the two parties. However, we show that, like any discourse, client centredness has no intrinsic meaning and is played out by actors in very different ways. In work with the homeless, the discourse of client centredness is related to discourses of ‘neediness’, ‘worthiness’ and ‘value for money’ that define agency in different ways and make three different client positions available: the resolute client, the acquiescent client and the passive client.     

Utilizing Web‐based Databases to Introduce Social Work Content in Research Statistics Courses

Masters level statistics is often not a course of choice for social work students. Teaching it in such a way that students' anxiety is reduced while facilitating their recognition of the importance of empirical knowledge in their social work practice and their need to have fundamental research skills, can be quite challenging. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a pedagogical tool used in a course on bivariate statistics that involves students throughout the semester in the process of developing and testing their own hypotheses regarding fluctuations in reported hate crimes/capita by states (as reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation). This technique provides continuity throughout the semester and is easily adapted to other issues equally important to social work. The data's unintuitive findings that disagree with most students' hypotheses also challenges students to consider methodological issues and the validity of the data. Because most students do not have a strong knowledge base of hate crimes, students often have to grapple with how their own preconceptions might bias their understanding of an issue and potentially their work with a client or client system. From an instructional standpoint, the method is contained and manageable, and the data are easily accessible.     

Intergenerational Wellness Programming in Occupational Therapy

Abstract

An intergenerational Wellness program was implemented by occupational therapy students at Laboure House located in Chicago, Illinois, in the fall of 2001 as part of a grant funded by the National Service Corporation in conjunction with the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. Program goals include: (a) developing students' skills in evaluation and Wellness programming by participating in an intergenerational service learning project, (b) providing occupation-based Wellness programming for the residents, and (c) promoting Wellness for the residents by encouraging them to find meaning in their lives through a variety of wellness/health promotion activities. Outcome measures used to assess change in the residents included the COPM (Canadian Occupational Performance Measure) (Law, Baptiste, Carswell, McColl, Polatajko, & Pollock, 1998) and the SF-36 (Ware, 1992). Tools used to assess students' performance included internship assessment forms and qualitative data from students' reflective journals. Preliminary results indicate improvement in awareness of Wellness and health promotion activities by the residents as well as a positive learning experience for students.     

Health Behaviors,Self-Rated Health,and Quality of Life: A Study Among First-Year Swedish University Students

Abstract

The authors conducted a baseline investigation of male and female university students' health behaviors and self-rated health and quality of life (QOL). The study population consisted of all full-time, first-year students registered in a comprehensive study program offered at a Swedish university in autumn 1998. In spring 1999, the researchers sent self-administered questionnaires dealing with health status, lifestyle, and living conditions to the students at their home addresses. Male respondents used tobacco, were frequent drinkers, and engaged in binge drinking in larger proportions than expected by chance. A majority of the respondents rated their physical and psychological health as very good or good, but male students' ratings were higher than those of female students, whereas the males' average scores on self-perceived QOL were lower than those of females. Both male and female students' self-perceived QOL was more strongly associated with self-rated psychological than with physical health.