Technology-Enhanced Practice Courses and Collaborative Learning in Distance Education

This article describes the use of a research-based teaching model using digital technology to enhance self-efficacy and group work practice skills in an undergraduate social work course. Our project focused on the development of group leadership interactional skill training for undergraduate social work students. We present pedagogical and theoretical approaches explaining a teaching model, which is designed to utilize digital technology and collaborative learning strategies in Interactive Video Connected (IVC) and traditional face-to-face classrooms. We explore how the teaching model impacts student perception of self-efficacy regarding group work practice skills.     

Allies in Learning: Critical-Reflective Practice On-line with Allied Mental Health Practitioners

This paper is a reflection in action using personal examples of student feedback to guide teaching. In 2003, a post-graduate course was developed at Victoria University in New Zealand for occupational therapists and social workers employed in the mental health services. The aim of the programme is to provide opportunities for on-the-job learning while recruiting and retaining a skilled allied mental health workforce. The programme is publicly funded for students as part of a national workforce development strategy for mental health professionals. In this article, I reflect upon my first year as co-ordinator of the programme in 2007–2008. Due to my background as a social worker and my familiarity with social work theories of practice, I focus on my theories of teaching from a social work perspective while returning to reflect on themes for the student cohort as a whole. The programme is delivered using distance methods supported by nine days of on-site learning throughout the academic year. A problem-based learning (PBL) approach delivered on the Internet platform, ‘Blackboard’, enables students to study from their workplaces. The conceptual model of teaching evolved is a process of ‘creative attunement’ to the learner's world. I conclude by providing examples of the key elements of my teaching/learning model as a ‘work in progress’.     

Widening the Lens: The Efficacy of the Case Method in Helping Direct Practice MSW Students Understand and Apply Mezzo and Macro Dimensions of Practice

This study tested the effectiveness of the case method as a teaching and learning tool to help direct practice (micro) graduate students to more fully incorporate the mezzo and macro dimensions in clinical situations. Participants for this study included 115 MSW students enrolled in a second‐year clinical concentration who, as a requirement of the program, took an integrative seminar that was taught using the case method. Students completed a pre‐ and post‐test that measured the importance students placed on selected mezzo and macro dimensions of practice. The study also assessed whether the case method influenced students' perceived capacity for critical thinking, vertical integration of first‐ with second‐year content, and understanding the program's theoretical model. Results showed significant increases in several areas assessed. The paper begins by tracing the historical and contemporary writings in the social work literature on integrated learning, and discusses the impact of these trends on the learning process. Ideas on how to build integrative opportunities or methods of instruction into the social work curriculum are then explored. The case method is advocated as a viable tool in teaching with empirical evidence presented to support its efficacy.     

Teaching Critical Reflection: A Tool for Transformative Learning in Social Work?

In an Australian Bachelor of Social Work degree, critical reflection is a process explicitly taught in a fourth year subject to students who have returned from their first field placement experience in agencies delivering social work programmes. The purpose of teaching critical reflection is to enable social work students to become autonomous and critical thinkers who can reflect on society, the role of social work and social work practices. The way critical reflection is taught in this fourth year social work unit relates closely to the aims of transformative learning. Transformative learning aims to assist students to become autonomous thinkers. Specifically, the critical reflection process taught in this subject aims to assist students to recognise their own and other people's frames of reference, to identify the dominant discourses circulating in making sense of their experience, to problematise their taken-for -granted ‘lived experience’, to reconceptualise identity categories, disrupt assumed causal relations and to reflect on how power relations are operating. Critical reflection often draws on many theoretical frameworks to enable the recognition of current modes of thinking and doing. In this paper, we will draw primarily on how post-structural theories, specifically Foucault's theorising, disrupt several taken-for-granted concepts in social work.     

Technology-Enhanced Active Learning Classrooms: New Directions for Social Work Education

Social work educators are increasingly exploring how to effectively use technology in their classrooms. The purpose of this study was to explore how a technology-enhanced active learning classroom influenced social work students’ engagement and overall learning experiences. An online survey was conducted with 125 social work students from micro and macro courses. When compared to macro courses, students from micro social work courses more positively reported active participation, effective teaching, and technical skills as benefits of the classroom. Furthermore, the dynamic learning environment and instructors’ effective teaching significantly affected students’ positive learning experience. Social work programs should develop various teaching methods for active learning classrooms to develop students’ practice skills that can be transferred to the real world.     

Preparing social work students for policy practice: an Australian example

This paper presents an innovative approach to the teaching of policy skills across the two years of an Australian Social Work degree programme. It argues that placing policy back into practice and teaching the skills involved provides social work practitioners with a better capacity to effect change. Australian Catholic University, School of Social Work is located in Australia's capital city. The policy units have a clear framework within which to understand policy development and provide students with real hands‐on policy experience combining an experiential based learning approach with traditional teaching methods. The second year subject is structured around a number of policy workshops. Each workshop deals with a current policy problem and examines a different stage of policy development. It has as a consultant to the process a social worker who works as a policy practitioner providing a role model of practice in a policy area. Feedback from students has been extremely positive reporting increased confidence in policy skills and a recognition of the importance of these skills in social work. This teaching experience reinforces the need to focus on the educational considerations in teaching a subject where conceptual, theoretical and skill components are equally important if policy practice is to effect change.     

Solving Current Social Challenges: Engaging Undergraduates in Policy Practice

This article explores an innovation in teaching policy practice at the undergraduate level. It analyzes an experiential learning model that uses current social challenges as a compelling way to generate student learning about policy practice. Over the course of the semester, students examine antecedents, current issues, and potential solutions to a contemporary social issue through a series of assignments that build knowledge and skills and link the topic to larger social policy concerns. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from seven semesters, the article explores benefits and challenges of this approach to teaching, and derives lessons for social work education.     

What do we know the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education? An empirical case study evidencing contested engagement and transformative learning

ABSTRACT

In social work education there have been very few attempts to empirically capture and measure how professional training programmes prepare students to work with ‘race’ equality and cultural diversity issues. This paper interrogates the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education and evaluates the pedagogic relevance and practice utility of teaching social work students about ‘race’, racism and anti-racism. The data presented in this paper suggests that it is possible to discover the situated experiences of learning about anti-racism and measure how this teaching can affect and lead to knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The triangulated mixed methods evidence presented in this paper combines nomothetic and idiographic approaches with quantitative data for a matched pair sample of 36 social work students and uses non-parametric statistical tests to measure at two time intervals (before and after teaching); knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The paper explores how anti-racist social work education enables students to move from ‘magical consciousness’, where racism and racial oppression is invisible and thereby left unchallenged and maintained, to more critical and reflexive level of awareness where it is named, challenged and no longer shrouded in a culture of professional denial and silencing.     

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.     

Adult learning styles: Implications for practice teaching in social work

This paper focuses on the current aspiration to further the process of continuing professional development in social work. It contends that knowledge from the field of adult learning theory may be helpful in sign-posting some tangible ways forward here. The particular emphasis is on critically assessing the usefulness of identifying learning styles as indicators of preferred ways of learning. Knowledge of learning styles is explored as one way of promoting students' learning on practice placements. A small-scale qualitative research study with a group of practice teachers and their students is presented as a vehicle for exploring this new terrain in social work. The findings of this research build on key themes identified by the current literature in this area. The author's findings suggest that information about learning styles has direct practical application in the social work practice teaching arena. The data points to the potential value of using such information to guide students' learning on practice placements and has relevance to considerations of their continuing professional development. Suggestions are put forward to highlight how practice teaching and Diploma in Social Work programmes could facilitate this process. The paper stresses the over-riding need to view students as actors in a broader social context, however, and highlights how information regarding learning styles needs to be utilised in this context.     

Learning social work law: An enquiry-based approach to developing knowledge and skills

This paper, written jointly by tutors and students, discusses an enquiry-based approach to learning and assessing law as part of social work qualifying training in England. It is argued that social work law is an area of learning particularly suited to an approach in which enquiry and analysis skills are promoted through practical problem solving. The paper considers the theoretical rationale for this approach and identifies how this conceptual frame informs the learning and assessment structure. It identifies how students present evidence for assessment of their skill and knowledge development, through both written and verbal submission, and considers the learning outcomes achieved. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the approach as an example of knowledge and skill development through problem solving and reflection.     

Ethical Teaching of Multicultural Students:

Within the last decade there has been an increased interest in teaching students about social work values and ethical issues in the classroom, as well as in field placements. Since students learn not only from what they are taught, but also through what they observe, the social work educator becomes an important role model for the student in learning about how social work values are operationalized. Just as traditional social work values of autonomy, self-determination, and confidentiality face many challenges in agency practice, the current cultural diversity of social work students calls for a reexamination of these values, if the social work educator hopes to effectively model ethical behavior. Above all, in the classroom and in academic program planning, social work educators must practice anti-discrimination behavior and gaurd against paternalistic attitudes toward students in order to educate ethically culturally diverse students.     

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.     

The Learning Relationship: Working Through Disjunctions in the Classroom

This paper advances a relational perspective to teaching social work practice. The reflective use of this relationship aids the instructor in conceptualizing interactions with students in ways that further the students' understanding of social work practice. We argue that students learn first-hand about social work through the instructor-student relationship. Inevitably, parallel to clinical practice and the client-worker relationship, disjunctions in the learning relationship occur. Drawing on the literature pertaining to the client-worker relationship and to the supervisor-supervisee relationship, this paper explores the use of this relationship to address ruptures in the learning process and to enhance students' professional development.     

Teaching Critical Practice: Resisting Structural Domination through Critical Reflection

This paper explores some of the responsibilities and challenges that face social work educators who teach critical practice to social work students. It is suggested that using critical reflection may enhance social work educators' capacity to prepare practitioners to work towards progressive social change and social justice, despite current social trends, such as globalisation, which potentially marginalise critical practice. This paper provides a reflective account of my experiences of teaching critical reflection to undergraduate social work students, drawing on critical postmodern theoretical underpinnings. Related pedagogies will be discussed which outline experiential reflective learning. It is ultimately contended that critical reflection is an important part of social work education and practice that is committed to enhancing citizenship, human rights, social justice and social change ideals.     

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.     

A Tale of Two Programmes: Developing Communities of Learning with Practice Partners in Social Work and Humanitarian Studies at Charles Darwin University,Northern Territory,Australia

Online engagement is difficult when teaching complex clinical reasoning skills which are central to developing professionalism in the health and welfare workforce. This paper explores how our team has engaged students in online discussion by introducing research projects brought by our practice partners to the mix of activities completed by students. At Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory, Australia, the social work and humanitarian studies degree-level programmes are delivered in blended mode involving a combination of face-to-face and online learning. Within these modes of delivery students are presented with questions and activities drawn from our practice partners to bring ‘real world relevance’ to learning. Drawing from examples provided by the practice settings in which the students wish to work after they graduate, we have found that this relationship between the academy and practice agency effectively bridges the gap between the worlds of theory and practice for our students. In a community of learning model, students elect to work on local practice partners' projects throughout the semester. This mix of academia working in partnership with frontline social and humanitarian workers brings immediacy to the learning. Opportunities for ‘deep learning’ are facilitated by this partnership approach. The implications for using communities of learning models for engaging students from two professions in online activities are discussed.     

Threshold Theory and Social Work Education

Critical reflection is a concept in social work education that holds a significant place—it provides both foundational theoretical ideas about the practice of social work, and is also a process used in career-long learning. Understanding critical reflection as a threshold theory concept—a higher education learning and teaching concept—providing a framework which assists educators in teaching critical reflection. Threshold theory identifies certain concepts as foundational within a discipline—these are transformative in profoundly altering the way students understand the subject. As with critical reflection, they are also integrative, conceptually difficult or ‘troublesome’ and difficult to forget.

The intrinsic nature of critical reflection makes its use as a conceptual model in practice a complex task: it requires the integration of theoretical knowledge, in a multiple-step methodology. Students must fully engage with the process, in identifying the impact of their lived experience, values and beliefs on their practice, as well as power, social structures and influential discourses. This article argues that threshold theory assists educators in understanding the nature of learning that is required for students to master critical reflection in social work education     

‘I can see it in the nightclub’: dance,capoeira and male bodies

This paper reports an ethnographic study of how Brazilians teaching capoeira in the UK use dance as a discursive and embodied pedagogic strategy both to change men's bodies and also to gauge the success of their instructional work. The theoretical framework is drawn from Herzfeld's neglected study of the poetics of manhood in Crete which is revisited in the light of his subsequent analysis of the embodiment of ethnographic practice. Ethnographic research is used to show how British men learning capoeira are enculturated into a different, Brazilian, embodiment in which dance is masculine, and dancing is one way to display a social self‐regard. Discourse about performance helps to define the appropriateness of the social self‐regard that the capoeira students acquire and display.