Constructing collaborative processes through experiential learning: Participatory planning in Kaymaklı, Turkey

Prevalent discussions in urban planning focus on collaboration. However, they do not explain the underlying processes that allow collaborative work. This paper argues that experiential learning processes can help construct and maintain collaborative platforms in urban planning. To show this, the paper uses the participatory planning of Kaymaklı, a small agricultural and touristic town in the internationally well-known cultural landscape, the Cappadoccia region. This entails the second stage of a two-year long Participatory Action Research project initiated by a local civil association in collaboration with the Municipality of Kaymaklı. The paper presents how the local capacity for collaboration is built through the development of local knowledge in a practice-based training programme. The attention is particularly directed to the pedagogic design of the training programme, the shared knowledge that came out of it, the affects of the programme on the collaborative capacity of participants, and their future collaborative action.     

A Case-based Collaborative Learning Model for Teaching Advocacy

Social work graduate school programs focusing on clinical practice have traditionally attended less to the profession's advocacy role. Masters-level clinical social work students, therefore, may not receive adequate training to understand their roles in advocating for or against policies that directly impact their practice. This article proposes a collaborative learning model called ‘Advocacy Week’, which prepares students for a statewide NASW-sponsored Advocacy Day. Using case presentations prepared in collaboration with clinical and policy social work faculty, aspiring clinical social work practitioners are exposed to the relevance of advocacy. Preliminary findings suggest that graduate students exposed to this model become aware of their advocate role as part of their clinical practice, a knowledge which has implications for social work education.     

The role of social work field education programmes in the transmission of developmental social work knowledge in Southern and East Africa

This paper reports on the findings of a study on the role of social work field education programmes in the transmission of developmental social work knowledge in Southern and East Africa. It highlights the challenges in locating developmental social work placements and the creativity shown by social work educators in addressing these challenges and improving learning opportunities for social work students. Both academics and students were found to be committed to developmental social work, within a willing practice environment hampered by knowledge, capacity and resource constraints. Social work education was found to be playing a transformative role through the teaching of a developmental social work curriculum and the creation of collaborative developmental social work learning experiences. Social work educators trained and supported agency supervisors in developmental social work, while students served as conduits, modelling developmental social work practice. What has yet to be determined in future research is the students’ perspective of this developmental educational environment.     

Collaborative Approaches to Family Systems Supervision: Differentiation of Self

Many systems approaches speak to the importance of respectful mutual curiosity in supervision rather than linear teacher–learner didacticism. This paper provides an overview of collaborative approaches to supervision in family therapy. It then focuses on Bowen family systems and encouraging differentiation in the relationship process between supervisor and supervisee as a useful approach towards equal collaboration. The authors use case examples to illustrate what impedes and fosters mutuality in the supervision process where both supervisor and supervisee learn from each other.     

Thinking Like a Social Worker: Examining the Meaning of Critical Thinking in Social Work

This article proposes a model for interprofessional collaboration within the context and process of field experiences in public schools. The model evolved out of a collaborative venture between the schools of social work and education at Boston College. The placement of pairs of social work and education interns in urban schools provided an opportunity to identify the nature of collaboration that is transdisciplinary and not parallel practice. This transdisciplinary practice model is based on a common goal, discipline-specific objectives, and co-facilitated activities. The discussion includes issues of project design and implementation as well as the advantages and challenges of interprofessional field work.     

Achieving Collaborative Competence through Interprofessional Education. Lessons Learned from Joint Training in Learning Disability Nursing and Social Work

The ability to work interprofessionally is widely regarded as essential to professional education and training for social work. The changing contexts of social work practice and the requirement for integrated working are regular reminders of the need for social work students to develop collaborative competence. Guidance preceding the development of the social work degree emphasised that social work students should undertake specific learning and assessment in partnership working and information sharing. This suggests that aspects of interprofessional education are relevant to the teaching and development of social work students if graduates are to successfully engage in complex practice.

This paper seeks to identify the competencies needed for successful collaboration. It then draws on evaluative research of joint training programmes in learning disability nursing and social work in England to discuss the unique experiences and perspectives of graduates whose social work training was exceptionally interprofessional. The paper will discuss how some of the findings from this research can indicate lessons for promoting collaborative competence in singly trained social work students. It will argue that interprofessional learning opportunities are one of the key ingredients for the development of critical practice.     

Transcending Boundaries

SUMMARY

This paper presents a participatory research and planned change effort to develop a coordinated community response system to domestic violence in a United States culturally diverse community with a large immigrant population. This work grew out of an international, interdisciplinary project that was designed to establish ongoing collaborative relationships between university and community practitioners in the United States, Honduras, and Costa Rica around the theme of intra-familial violence, particularly gender-based violence against women. The paper analytically describes the international collaborative project, the local community-based participatory research and community development project, and lessons learned from both the local and international interdisciplinary collaboration. Examination of differences across disciplinary and cultural contexts generated critical reflection on the need to consider reframing domestic violence in the context of fundamental human rights, as is the case in Central America. At the same time, challenges around developing a coordinated community response, addressing inadequacies in the legal system, and implementing education and training were echoed across boundaries, demonstrating the need for continued international collaboration.     

A Place for Every Tool and Every Tool in Its Place: Cognitive Integrative Perspective for Coherence on the New Frontier of Mind and Body Practice

There is currently a growing research and clinical knowledge base regarding the application of Eastern traditions, especially mindfulness and other forms of meditation, to direct practice. As we incorporate new tools for intervention into our toolkit, it is important to expand our theoretical framework so that we can know when to utilize these tools, how their mechanism fits with the tools we already have, and what kinds of change or outcomes we should expect from utilizing them. These new tools are powerful across many experiences of distress, but clear guidelines are necessary to maximize their benefit. Berlin’s cognitive-integrative perspective provides a framework that allows for reflective understanding and application of mind/body/spirit that is consistent with social work values and what we currently know about the underlying science of mind. Using concrete examples from direct practice, this paper will lay out the framework that is consonant with Siegel’s interpersonal neurobiology, discussed in this volume, and also firmly rooted in the person-in-environment perspective that is characteristic of social work.     

Social work and interprofessional education: integration,intersectionality, and institutional leadership

Over the last decade healthcare policies and practices in the US have placed significant emphasis on healthcare integration, mental health parity, and implementation of team-based practice models to improve quality, safety, and affordability of service. With these incentives in mind, schools of social work have joined with national and international health education organizations to reduce disciplinary silos and increase shared learning opportunities across professions and programs. The social work profession has long supported collaborative practice however, students are rarely paired with others in the classroom or intentionally taught about counterparts’ roles and expertise. Social work leaders are also responsible for addressing the intersectionality between collaborative competencies and sociocultural factors. The 2015 EPAS and 2016 Core Competencies for Interprofessional Collaborative Practice create multi-level opportunities for social work educators to provide Interprofessional Education (IPE) innovation and leadership across common curricula and educational settings. The authors examine historic challenges to integrating IPE in social work curricula, provide three examples of IPE/social work initiatives in higher education, describe the intersectionality of the EPAS and the IPEC competencies, and identify institutional benefits associated with the integration of IPE in schools of social work culture and curriculum.     

Collaborative evaluation of a high school prevention curriculum: How methods of collaborative evaluation enhanced a randomized control trial to inform program improvement

Blending high-quality and rigorous research with pure evaluation practice can often be best accomplished through thoughtful collaboration. The evaluation of a high school drug prevention program (All Stars Senior) is an example of how perceived competing purposes and methodologies can coexist to investigate formative and summative outcome variables that can be used for program improvement. Throughout this project there were many examples of client learning from evaluator and evaluator learning from client. This article presents convincing evidence that collaborative evaluation can improve the design, implementation, and findings of the randomized control trial. Throughout this paper, we discuss many examples of good science, good evaluation, and other practical benefits of practicing collaborative evaluation. Ultimately, the authors created the term pre-formative evaluation to describe the period prior to data collection and before program implementation, when collaborative evaluation can inform program improvement.     

Therapeutic collaboration: Bridging the gap between statutory and therapeutic work

This paper will consider the clinical effectiveness of child and youth mental health workers and child protection workers employing a therapeutic collaborative model for practice when engaged with extremely at risk and vulnerable families. It will be argued that this approach has the potential to assist professionals work in a meaningful way that enhances therapeutic containment and subsequent engagement with families. The author will advocate for a model that does not demarcate statutory from psychological thinking. Indeed, such a split it is argued, promotes barriers that impede and fragment the helping process. Various examples will be discussed using this practice model, including the need for greater flexibility and professional goodwill across government and non-government agencies.     

Redesigning the curriculum for Social Work Education: complexity,conformity, chaos,creativity, collaboration?

Across the UK social work programmes in universities have been re‐designed for the introduction of the new degree. Despite its importance, the nature and process of curriculum design for social work is not well understood, and the research‐base is thin. With more detailed content requirements there is a potential danger of increasing conformity. The wider literature on curriculum design in higher education identifies different paradigms to conceptualise curriculum design, and has recently focussed on the extent to which creativity can be engendered within a highly complex context. Starting with these concepts, this paper analyses the issues for curriculum design in social work. Given the new academic and professional requirements, the interplay of practice and university‐based learning, and the engagement with multiple stakeholders, it is argued that this entails a level of complexity greater than that for many other disciplines. The value of complexity theory as a framework to understand the processes involved is discussed. The constraints arising from the short time frame available to re‐design the curriculum are discussed, with the danger of chaotic transition. It is argued that curriculum design for social work should be better understood, through research and debate, so that all participants may be better able to contribute through collaboration.     

Interdisciplinary Social Work and Law

Collaboration between social workers and lawyers has been of particular interest to schools of social work due to the increasing frequency with which social workers intervene with clients involved in the legal system. This article presents an educational model specifically designed to teach the interdisciplinary knowledge and skills necessary to work effectively with domestic violence. The model provides training in collaborative practice between social workers and lawyers while integrating domestic violence content with the relevant legal regulations and procedures and social work interventions. The article describes course content, teaching techniques, and student assessment, and discusses special challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration.     

Tools for Collaboration: Using and Designing Tools in Interorganizational Economic-Crime Investigation

Economic-crime investigation in Finland is in transition from hierarchically organized, sequential collaboration between authorities toward parallel, interorganizational collaboration. This article describes the tools used and developed for managing the new collaborative economic-crime-investigation process. The challenge is to find interoganizational investigative tools that are flexible enough to shift between vertical use within and horizontal use across organizations. Local construction is often needed in collaborative networks, otherwise the tool never meets the needs of the divergent users. A good tool is sensitive enough to adapt to local settings, and robust enough to be transferable to other contexts. In this article, I give empirical examples of how the challenge is met in the economic-crime investigation cases followed from 1999 to 2002. The findings suggest that the standardization of tools does not take place merely from the top-down, and that something new is emerging: collaborative standardization of local innovations.     

Advances in collaborative evaluation

Collaborative evaluation is an approach that offers, among others, many advantages in terms of access to information, quality of information gathered, opportunities for creative problem-solving, and receptivity to findings. In the last decade, collaborative evaluation has grown in popularity along with similar participatory, empowerment, and utilization-focused evaluation approaches. Increasingly, it has brought together evaluators and stakeholders from different sectors, disciplines, and cultures to exchange knowledge on how collaboration can be used as a strategic tool for fostering and strengthening evaluation practice. O'Sullivan (2004) and Rodríguez-Campos (2005, 2008) brought forward collaborative evaluation conceptual frameworks that distinguished it from other approaches. This article updates those conceptual frameworks and discusses key collaborative evaluation advances in order to further clarify and facilitate engagement in sound practice.     

Forget Cultural Competence; Ask for an Autobiography

Recent management practices seek to standardize and routinize practice through formulaic assessment processes and casework to ensure risk minimization and cost effectiveness. Such pressures have become entrenched in social work practice in Australia and other economically developed societies. Under such regimes cultural competence is rendered as expert knowledge about the other to be acquired and applied in ways to ensure maximum efficiency. But working effectively across racial and cultural differences demands critical reflection on one's own position and the complex interactions between different aspects of identity. While some versions of cultural competence incorporate the need to examine our own values and behaviours, the paper argues that rather than focusing on knowledge of differences, social workers should concentrate on critically listening to our clients' autobiographies to reveal over time what aspects of their social and cultural lives matter to them. The paper reviews findings from teaching Australian social work undergraduate and graduate students engaging with these challenges with particular reference to working effectively with Indigenous people.     

Advances in collaborative evaluation

Collaborative evaluation is an approach that offers, among others, many advantages in terms of access to information, quality of information gathered, opportunities for creative problem-solving, and receptivity to findings. In the last decade, collaborative evaluation has grown in popularity along with similar participatory, empowerment, and utilization-focused evaluation approaches. Increasingly, it has brought together evaluators and stakeholders from different sectors, disciplines, and cultures to exchange knowledge on how collaboration can be used as a strategic tool for fostering and strengthening evaluation practice. O'Sullivan (2004) and Rodríguez-Campos, 2005, Rodríguez-Campos, 2008 brought forward collaborative evaluation conceptual frameworks that distinguished it from other approaches. This article updates those conceptual frameworks and discusses key collaborative evaluation advances in order to further clarify and facilitate engagement in sound practice.