Looking for ‘social work’ in school social work

School social workers can be seen as a professional group operating on the margin of an educational logic that dominates schools as institutions. This conditions what tasks they are assigned and what aspects of social work knowledge they will find relevant. On the other hand, the role as a sole professional and relative outsider in the organization provides a potential for school social workers to transcend established theories of social work practice. This article aims to investigate how social work theory is applied in school social work. Twelve semi-structured interviews with school social workers were analysed in terms of how they relate to four knowledge approaches derived from the literature: task-centred, systems theory, strengths and anti-oppressive. Contrary to claims within the sociology of professions that social work practice is formed largely by organizational context rather than a discipline-specific knowledge base, the interviewees seemed to lean on a robust professional foundation within social work theory. Interviewees strongly emphasised their role as working for the individual pupil and positioned themselves as somewhat in opposition to a somewhat oppressive school environment.     

Review of Australian Health Related Social Work Research 1990–2009

Abstract

Social workers form a critical component of the Australian health workforce. While their roles as practitioners are very strategic within the health system, less clear is their contribution to health research. This paper reviews the published record of social work research in Australian health from 1990–2009 in order to discern the patterns of the social work contribution to new knowledge in health. The results of this review indicate a tendency to focus on discursive commentary rather than empirical research as well as a less-than-expected focus on client studies. Given the rise of evidence-based practice, there are potentially serious implications for social work in terms of how it positions itself as a contributor to new knowledge within the health field.     

Preparation for practice: embedding the development of professional identity within social work curriculum

Newly qualified social workers often enter challenging interdisciplinary settings where they need to be able to clearly articulate a distinctive professional identity. To prepare for these realities, this paper discusses how the development of professional identity has become increasingly central to qualifying social work curriculum at an Australian university. Preparation for social work practice has long been the focus of research in a number of countries, with a significant emphasis on knowledge and skill acquisition, rather than on the development of an overarching professional identity that is also underpinned by shared values and sense of professional purpose and expectations. Against this backdrop, the paper describes initial changes that have been made within core social work courses to progressively embed the development of professional identity more consciously across their studies, to be better prepared for contemporary challenges in the workplace. It is concluded that further changes are needed to fully transform the curriculum, and that the impacts of these changes be systematically evaluated in relation to preparedness for practice.     

Promoting Creative Practice through Social Work Education

It has been suggested that the essence of professional work lies in the balance between the performance of technical tasks and the exercise of judgement and discretion—the ‘technicality/indeterminacy’ debate. A skilled social worker must be capable of applying a range of knowledge, skills and values in a variety of practice circumstances, the precise nature of which cannot always be predicted. This presents a challenge for social work education, previously governed by a reductive notion of ‘competence’ in its planning and delivery. This paper will explore the nature of judgement and creativity in practice, identifying why such concepts are essential in contemporary social work. Accepting that qualified social workers must be capable of acting independently and autonomously, it will then examine the task that this presents for social work education—the need to prepare students (at both qualifying and post‐qualifying levels) to exercise judgement and discretion in professional practice. The paper will argue that the development of innovative forms of social work will depend upon the existence of forms of education that can foster and enhance students' ability to work creatively, and present ways in which this can be managed within both academic and practice curricula.     

Supporting students to use social media and comply with professional standards

Student social workers live in a world where sharing of information seems to be straightforward and unproblematic. However, data sharing is a contentious issue in practice that raises ethical issues. There is a focus on this aspect of practice in social work education particularly in the context of data storage, confidentiality and multi-disciplinary work. There have been examples of qualified workers being sanctioned by the Health Care Professions Council for breaching professional standards related to inappropriate use of social media. Understanding the advantages and potential pitfalls of social media is crucial for social workers. The aim of this research was to develop an understanding about how student social workers use social media during their time at university as a tool for continuing professional development whilst balancing the need to present a professional persona. This paper reports on four themes that emerged from a study that considered social media and social work training: changing/securing profiles; using social media to support learning and development; university support; replicating earlier behaviour in the professional setting. The findings suggest student social workers are ambivalent about the use of social media both during training and as a way to support ongoing development beyond the university setting.     

Students' Use of Self: Teaching Implications

Social workers acknowledge that they bring more than their professional skills and knowledge to practice, hence the emphasis in many social work programs on enhancing students' self knowledge. After a general overview of self‐knowledge activities for students, the gap between insight and practice is highlighted. The empirical literature is reviewed to find specific and purposeful self enactments, defined as functional ways in which workers intentionally apply their self to practice. Located within professional boundaries, such self enactments potentially form the basis upon which students might consider how to apply their own personal self.     

Equal or individual treatment: contesting storylines in needs assessment conversations within Swedish eldercare

This article examines the role of care managers and their work in putting policy into practice in micro-interactions with older people in Swedish eldercare. The care managers assess the individual needs of older people, and decide what type of social care and services will be given. Dilemmas in care management are often related to the gap between needs and resources. The aim was to study the positioning of care managers within different storylines advanced in needs assessment conversations. Positioning theory was applied to study discursive practices and discursive strategies within Swedish eldercare. Audio-recorded needs assessment conversations among care managers, older people and their relatives at care planning meetings in connection with hospital discharge were analyzed. Two overall positions were identified for care managers—as ‘professional experts’ and as ‘organizational representatives’—allowing the care managers to maneuver within two contesting storylines: ‘distribution of scarce eldercare resources based on the principles of eligibility and equal treatment’ and ‘older people entitled to eldercare according to their own perceived individual needs’. For social work, the results showed the importance of discussing how care managers might move towards exercising greater professional autonomy, becoming less dependent on their position in the organization.     

Hearing the stories of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social workers: challenging and educating the system

Hearing the stories of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social workers highlights the powerful influence that cultural identity has on their practice. Their identity is continuously negotiated alongside a professional social work identity that is dominated by Western discourse. The tensions that these social workers experience in their practice is revealed in the findings of a qualitative research project conducted by an Indigenous and a non-Indigenous practitioner and researcher. The researchers spoke to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social workers engaged in diverse areas of practice across Australia. Their stories reveal a complex range of cultural and professional challenges. These include the difficulties encountered when working with their own kinship networks and the need to constantly negotiate personal and professional boundaries. The paper concludes with some thoughts about how the practice of Indigenous social workers can provide valuable lessons for Australian social work.     

Social Work Training or Social Work Education? An Approach to Curriculum Design

Population ageing, economic circumstances and human behaviour are placing social welfare systems under great strain. In England, extensive reform of the social work profession is taking place. Training curricula are being redesigned in the context of new standards of competence for social workers—the Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF). Students must be equipped on qualifying to address an extensive range of human problems, presenting major challenges to educators. Critical theory suggests an approach to tackle one such challenge—selecting the essential content required for areas of particular practice. Teaching on social work with older people is used to illustrate this. Habermas' theory of cognitive interests highlights the different professional roles served by the social work knowledge base—instrumental, interpretive and emancipatory. Howe's application of sociological theory distinguished four social work roles corresponding to these. It is suggested that curriculum design decisions must enable practitioners to operate in each. When preparing students to work with older people, educators therefore need to include interpretive and emancipatory perspectives, and not construct social work purely as an instrumental response to problems older people present. This approach provides one useful rationale for curriculum design decisions, which is applicable to other areas of practice, and to contexts outside England.     

Social Workers as Boundary Spanners: Reframing our Professional Identity for Interprofessional Practice

One of the more difficult tasks for social work educators is socializing students into a professional identity. Social identity theory provides a lens to consider what is needed for a social work identity that will continue to be salient for students as they move into practice. Framing social workers as boundary spanners might offer students a professional identity that is congruent with core values, reflects what social workers do and places less emphasis on old debates about the profession. It also positions students well for work in the increasingly interprofessional realms of health and social care. I consider how social workers are well equipped to meet the demand created by ‘joined-up working’ for people with boundary-spanning expertise. Seeing ourselves as boundary spanners is one way to reconcile our professional and interprofessional identities, thereby increasing the chances that our students will continue to identify as social workers when they move into interprofessional practice.     

The Theory Circle: A Tool for Learning and for Practice

Social workers have grappled for many years now with the tension between theory and practice. The struggle may be to bridge a perceived gap between the academic knowledge base of social work and the complex realities of practice. Equally, it may be to move from common‐sense interpretations of human need and professional responses, towards a more informed and accountable approach to practice. In recognition of the challenges faced by social work academics, practitioners and students, in relation to applying theory to practice, two of the authors of this paper developed a model, which aimed to facilitate productive discussions between practice teachers and students about the nature of theory and its link to practice. In addition, the model was designed to promote partnership approaches where service users participate fully in identifying their own issues and in shaping the services they receive. This paper describes the model—The Theory Circle—and reflects upon its effectiveness, based on the views of 19 practice teachers from central Scotland. The findings suggest that the pictorial model is one that practice teachers and students find accessible and valuable; it helps them to build a theoretical understanding of service users' situations and to work alongside service users to agree the most appropriate methods of intervention.     

Designing,Implementing and Evaluating a Social Work Practice Skills Course: A Case Example

Practice skills, such as communication and interviewing skills, are an integral part of every undergraduate course that aims to provide professional qualification for social workers. While there is substantial literature about the skills required to be a proficient social work practitioner, there is a dearth of literature about how to teach such skills and particularly how students experience such a course. By critically reflecting on the design, implementation and evaluation of a social work practice skills course, this article is offered as a contribution toward filling an identified gap in social work education literature. The course evaluation particularly highlights the importance of face to face interaction between students and teachers to the process of learning.     

Reconceptualising professional knowledge: the changing role of knowledge and evidence in social work practice

New socio-economic conditions have necessitated different approaches to professional learning and decision-making and alternative perspectives are required to properly understand and engage with the complexity of the world of work, learning and doing. This paper considers the international literature in relation to professional learning in the context of evidence-based practice and knowledge exchange, and considers how we might overcome existing barriers to implement a more knowledge-based approach to social work practice. By adopting actor network theory and socio-material theories, this paper begins to consider alternative perspectives on professional learning and knowledge exchange as implementation in social work. The paper argues that the production of knowledge itself is not enough to guarantee that even the best knowledge will have any utility in practice and that we now need to search for more effective ways of generating and implementing new knowledge. Furthermore, more attention needs to be given to how current approaches to research design, dissemination and implantation could become more meaningful for practice.     

Social workers in the new human services marketplace: Trends,challenges and responses

This paper examines employment trends in social welfare occupations and challenges to the industrial and cultural recognition of professional social work in the new human services market place. Following examination of the threats posed by market reform and the crisis in public confidence in some domains of human services work, I focus on three key concerns. First, through analysis of Census data from 1996 to 2001, I compare trends in the employment of social workers, welfare workers and community workers. Second, drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser (1997), I argue that the challenges facing social workers can be understood as problems of ‘recognition’. Using this framework, I examine the external contests to the valuing of professional social work and also the internal challenges, that is, threats from within the social work profession to the industrial and cultural recognition of social work. Finally, I will consider how social workers, particularly new graduates, can respond to the challenges facing them in the new human services marketplace. I propose that social workers should claim a position as practice leaders and I outline practical strategies for achieving this goal.     

The Resilient Survivor—A Student Social Worker's Journey

This article is intended to bridge the gap between the literature on the service user perspective, essential to social work training, and the personal experiences student social workers bring to their training. It argues that there is a need to recognise the personal and sometimes painful experiences student social workers may bring to their training and the potential impact they have on their social work education and future practice. Sexually abused as a child, the author is in a unique position as a first year social work student to explore and share the impact of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) on her social work education and how this has been managed. This article will chart a parallel journey of personal and professional development by exploring the importance of reflective thought on one's own personal experiences and discussing how these experiences can inform the professional knowledge, skills and value base. This article concludes that during personal and professional development potential issues or themes may arise. These include the blurring of personal/professional boundaries, the need for heightened self-awareness skills, the ability to use supervision appropriately and the potential to misuse personal insights.     

Being neither Pollyanna nor Henny Penny: Responding to McDonald and Jones

Abstract

This paper provides an account of the earliest contributions to family theory and practice by social workers, beginning in the late nineteenth century. The paper argues that the first widespread practice of ‘family work’ by the helping professions was carried out by social workers, primarily women, despite this being rarely acknowledged in the family therapy literature. An analysis of gender and its place in the development of professional status and the ownership of ideas is provided.

Summary

This paper has traced the place of the family in social work theory and practice since the beginnings of the profession, with a particular focus on theoretical developments in social work in the United States. A number of points have been argued. Firstly, there is significant historical evidence that social workers, most of them women, pioneered family work many decades before the term ‘family therapy’ was invented. This directly challenges the claim made by a number of family therapy historians that work with families was pioneered by psychiatrists in the 1950s and 1960s. It is argued here that this discrepancy is largely a result of differences in professional power and gender status.

Secondly, it is argued that the impact of psychoanalytic theory on social work was profound, not only in terms of how it might have distracted the profession from further developing its early family systems focus, but also in how its multidisciplinary practice tended to place social workers, again mostly women, in somewhat limited and prescribed positions.

In addition, it is argued that social work's emphasis on the family and family intervention has waxed and waned due to these concepts not appearing to fit neatly into divisions between fields of practice, such as casework, group work and Community development. While social work struggled with finding a place for the further development of family social work theory, the rapidly growing domain of family therapy quickly colonised this field of practice, giving little credit to the ground already laid by social workers.     

Making Research Count: What Australian Social Work Researchers Think

A central question in the research utilisation literature is what happens to research evidence once it is produced. In social work, this has frequently translated to questions of whether and how social workers use research in practice. Despite these questions, relatively little is known about the ways in which research comes to be used in social work practice. This paper reports on a study of research utilisation in social work, which examined researchers’ perceptions of the factors impacting on research use in social work. The specific focus of this study was on the impact of interaction between researchers and practitioners on research use in practice. The study replicated a scale used in prior studies on knowledge utilisation to collect data from 60 Australian researchers publishing in social work journals, all of whom reported some level of research use by practitioners. Key variables were coproduction, engagement, and research utilisation. Implications for future use of the survey instrument for the measurement and implementation of research use in social work are discussed.     

Towards an interactional approach to reflective practice in social work

Reflective practice is a key aspiration within social work; being a reflective practitioner is considered to be a foundational attribute of the social work professional. However, achieving reflective practice is not straightforward. Reflection is inevitably subject to issues of memory and recall, so that the recollection of a case is likely to differ in important ways from the original instance. Moreover, giving an account of an event to one's peers or supervisors involves aspects of justification and self-presentation that may emphasise selectively and ignore key details of the original event, whether through a process of conscious omission or subconscious forgetting. This article reports on a knowledge exchange project that sought to enhance criminal justice social workers’ reflective practice through the use of the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method, an approach that is methodologically and theoretically grounded in the study of talk-in-interaction, drawing on video re-enactments of real encounters between practitioners and service users. We argue that by engaging collaboratively in this way, the practitioners and researchers learned a great deal about how practice in criminal justice social work is ‘done’ and also about the wider context within which criminal justice social work is practised.