Confronting Uncertainty: Lessons from Rural Social Work

Abstract

Communities in Australia and internationally are experiencing massive change. Climate variability is an aspect of change that social workers in Australia, particularly in rural areas, are grappling with. Vulnerable populations will be at increased risk as extreme weather events increase in frequency. Communities will be facing social challenges hitherto unknown. The experience of uncertainty and fragmentation as characteristics of postmodernism has exposed the ambiguous and contested nature of much of social work practice and contributed to a crisis of confidence for the social work profession. The move towards rationality and linear approaches in the postwelfare state is often at odds with the complexity and uncertainty of human situations that has always been social work terrain. It can be argued that social work, with its ethical base, person-in-environment approach, expertise in ambiguity and complexity, and recognition of context, is well-placed to manage postmodern uncertainty. Using the 2009 Victorian bushfire example, I argue that an uncertain future is an opportunity for social workers, those working in rural areas in particular, to reassert social work's moral purpose in working with communities facing change. Implications for social work policy, practice, and education are briefly explored.     

Field education in crisis: experiences of field education coordinators in Canada

Significant multi-layered challenges with delivering quality practicum experiences to social work students have led field education coordinators to release a joint statement that social work field education in Canada is in a state of crisis. This article presents the results of a two-year mixed methods study that sought to investigate and describe the challenges in order to enhance understanding of the crisis from the perspective of Canadian social work field education coordinators. The results indicate that social work education programs in Canada face four key challenges in regard to field education that can be further divided into two sections: (a) the social work practice field and (b) social work field education administration. The two key challenges associated with the social work practice field are: (a) social work practice contexts and realities and (b) practicum shortages and saturation. The two key challenges associated with social work field education administration are: (a) practicum procurement and field instructor recruitment and retention; and (b) expectations and workloads of field education coordinators. To address these challenges, collaborative development of a multi-level strategy aimed at moving beyond the current state of crisis toward a sustainable model of social work field education in Canada is recommended.     

Social Work Education's Role in Addressing People and a Planet at Risk

As the nature of the earth's ecological crisis becomes increasingly dire and impossible to ignore and as global concern continues to increase, social work, with its investment in issues of justice and its commitment to a person-in-environment perspective, needs to more aggressively evaluate its place in this crisis. This paper presents a study designed to explore US social work students' attitudes, interests in, and practices related to the environment, as well as their perceptions of the place for environmental issues in the social work curriculum. This study's findings suggest that social work students' attitudes toward the environment are generally consonant with those of the US population, and that there is strong interest in enhancing the amount and scope of exposure to environmental issues in the social work curriculum. A sizable majority of all social work students surveyed view environmental justice as an important aspect of social justice and a viable area of concern for social workers, and they expressed an interest in seeing more content on environmental justice in social work education. Suggestions for integrating this content into the curriculum via inter- and trans-disciplinary, and service-learning approaches are discussed.     

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.     

Confidence in the economy in times of crisis: Social representations of experts and laypeople

This study investigates experts’ and laypeople's social representations of the financial and economic crisis, as widely discussed in the media after the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Financial experts (n = 156) and laypeople (n = 153) with low versus high confidence in the economic recovery spontaneously associated thoughts and beliefs about the crisis and to economic and political stakeholders. Following a mixed-methods approach, they evaluated economic stakeholders with regard to six trust items. The study was conducted in March 2010 in Austria, which was moderately affected by the crisis. The results indicate that economic variables (e.g., unemployment) were central to the social representations of the crisis, while underlying feelings of unfairness and egoism surfaced during the ongoing process of association. The social representation did not comprise a general criticism of the economic system. The differences between the subgroups depended on identification-based self-protection and economic knowledge. Experts and laypeople tended to attribute the economic crisis to specific stakeholders in a self-protecting way: experts blamed the media, laypeople blamed the managers, and both blamed the politicians. Interestingly, the subgroups tended to evaluate the banks as being relatively neutral. Expertise and differentiated economic knowledge was related to confidence in the economic recovery. Thus, the perceived capability of politicians in terms of competence and morality seems crucial for regaining public confidence in the economy.     

Transforming Social Work Curricula: Institutional Supports for Promoting Sustainability

Due to the centrality of human rights and social justice in the profession, social work must collectively take a stand on ecological degradation and the climate crisis. Overall, social work education's engagement with issues of sustainability and an expanded ecological justice perspective has been peripheral and piecemeal. It is crucial that social work education expand opportunities to prepare social workers to respond to the global environmental crisis. This conceptual paper considers strategies for integrating environmental content in social work curricula and addresses the essential role of institutional supports for curricular change and professional development focused on sustainability. The role of institutional supports to advance curricular change to respond to environmental crises and promote sustainability is highlighted, along with specific examples from the authors' home institution, including (1) institutional commitment and culture, (2) curricular supports and guidelines, and (3) interdisciplinary faculty development.     

Repositioning Risk in Social Work Education: Reflections Arising from the Threat of SARS to Social Work Students in Hong Kong during their Field Practicum

The social work profession has always been involved in dealing with uncertainty and risk in the life politics of clients. However, it is not easy for young social work students to translate this philosophical disposition into their real life practice with clients. In spring 2003, when the SARS epidemic broke out in Hong Kong, a group of social work students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong were doing their fieldwork practicum. Suddenly confronted by a collective sense of risk in their role as social workers, the students went through a period of unrest, as performing their helping duties brought with it a simultaneous exposure to personal risk. This paper is based on four focus group interviews with these social work students, to understand how they processed their experience of risk during their exposure to the SARS crisis, and how they connected the experience to their social work practice with clients. It is found that the predicament arising from the exposure to personal risk brought about by the SARS crisis during the students' field placement engendered the reflective process that enabled a renewed and personalized meaning of professionalism. The results provide a basis for reflection among social work educators on the role of risk in the training of prospective social workers, and on how social work education can better prepare students for practice in a high‐risk environment.     

Evaluation of Student Learning Outcomes in MSW Programs

Abstract

The Nation is experiencing a rural crisis of severe proportions. Initially, that crisis was tied to depressed commodity prices and the demise of family farms but current developments indicate that it is of greater scope. Farm closures have caused the exodus of citizens, businesses, banks and services from small towns, particularly in the Heartland and the agricultural South. Despair among farmers has resulted in suicide and homicide; a traditional way of life is under threat of extinction. Additionally, depressed oil and other mineral prices have changed the rhythm of many rural lives and caused displacement of workers in non-agricultural yet rural states. This paper reports the results of a national survey of social work schools and programs and assesses the response of social work education to this crisis. Programmatic innovations are inventoried; regional comparisons are offered on practitioner and program responses; factors that facilitated or hindered those responses are reviewed; and the purported anti-rural bias of social work is assessed.     

Social work—a shifting paradigm

This article explores the changing role of social work in the context of community care legislation, the political era and the resulting care management process, using Kuhn's concept of paradigms. (Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd Edition), (Chicago, University of Chicago Press). The article suggests that it is our values, the theories we use and the environment that is impacting on and creating a shift in the social welfare paradigm and social work. It proposes that there is a fundamental conflict between the traditional values and model of social work and the evolving care management role that social workers are assuming, which can, and is resulting in an identity crisis for social work professionals and presents evidence for this. The article concludes that social work is in a state of transition and crisis. In order to re-define itself it needs to consolidate its basis for being. Social work needs to re-align itself with its value base and firm knowledge base. Putting the client first rather than the State or its own professional interests, otherwise it is in danger of becoming simply an agent of the State rather than a service striving for equality and the welfare of its communities. In order to do this the article proposes that social work needs to be clear of its purpose, whom it is serving and how it proposes to move forward.     

Implications and challenges for social work education in Greece in the time of austerity

Following a discussion of the implications of one of the largest fiscal adjustments in modern times the paper identifies current challenges to social work practice and social work education in Greece and discusses the future of social work with radicalism as one of the central themes emerging during the crisis. It is argued that while at the moment radical social work has barely found any support from Greek social work practitioners, the implications of the socioeconomic crisis have given a significant boost to radical and critical social work on the educational front. It is further argued that in order to enhance these developments future efforts should concentrate on providing an effective guide for everyday practices that acknowledge the particularities of the specific context and will also include humane and holistic value-based approaches as well as the promotion of emancipatory values such as authenticity. In a progressively depoliticized public sphere that fosters the spread of individualism the above elements might be a critical step toward a more politically engaged social work education.     

Community development--action research in community settings

This paper considers the concept of resilience and how the natural qualities supportive of resilience in children and families can best be nurtured. It argues that there is an emerging crisis in bureaucratised child protection systems that alienates and undermines both social workers and clients, and that runs counter to the spirit of resilience‐led practice. Responding to this crisis requires a new emphasis on relationships, strengths and the clients' social context in child and family social work. It also requires practitioners and students to reflect carefully on the nature of helping. The paper explores some of the implications of these ideas for social work practice, education and policy.     

Social work education in Europe: towards 2025

ABSTRACT

Responses to profound contemporary transformation processes are characterised by ‘situationalism’ as the expression of resignation in the face of overwhelming complexity. An overemphasis on personal autonomy accompanied by a withdrawal to the seeming security of ‘given boundaries’ undermines programmes of social solidarity, which had been a means of creating stability and social integration at national and European levels. Social work’s origins as an academic discipline and as a profession reach back to the crisis phenomena that accompanied the early ‘project of modernity’, and reflection on that history can help to identify a critical role of social work education in view of what could be described as the current crisis of modernity. A future vision of social work education centres on the conventional mandate of this profession to ‘make a critical difference’ with regard to the deepening of social divisions through rampant individualism as well as concerning trends to impose uniformity as a substitute for equality.     

Exploring the Nexus Between Social Work and the Environment

Abstract

Within social work discourse, “the environment” seems inevitably to refer to the sociocultural environment. Such a focus reflects the domain that social work has defined for itself through various codes of ethics, as well as the theory and practice focus of social workers. Over a long period of time, doubt has gradually been dispelled about the effect that humankind has had on the environment, and it is now largely accepted that global warming has an anthropogenic basis. The present paper examines the place of social work in a world that is trying to come to terms with various ecological disasters, not the least of which is climate change. Social work is cast as a profession that needs to become more aware of the ways in which society is embedded in the natural world and our physical environment as a whole. The issue of social sustainability is explored as a focus for the relevance of social work knowledge and practice in this time of environmental crisis.     

Untapped Sources for Recruiting Minority BSW Students

Abstract

Social agencies and social services units currently are experiencing a personnel crisis. Many agency employees who provide direct services to clients lack professional education. Decreasing commitment to traditional social work practice with the most vulnerable populations and increasing interest in psychotherapeutic services may account for the shortage of professionally trained social workers.     

Finanzialisierung,Demokratie und Gesellschaft – zehn Jahre nach Beginn der Finanzkrise

This introduction to the special issue—ten years after the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers and the beginning of a worldwide financial, economic, and debt crisis—reflects on the extent to which the economic crisis affected a turning point in society overall. The current state of research into the relationship between financialization, democracy, and social conditions strongly suggests that while the processes of financialization that favored the emergence of a crisis were influenced by the financial crisis, they were not completely reversed. In fact, the financial market regulation, which was changed in response to the crisis, did not exert any modifying pressure in terms of a restructuring of the financial system. An epochal shift in financial market regulation therefore cannot be identified from the steps taken in the reform process. Elseways there is clear evidence that the financial crisis has had a lasting impact on the European integration process, confidence in democracy, and political culture. The financial crisis is therefore likely to be perceived as a historical watershed, mainly due to its impact on societal areas beyond the financial system itself.     

Social work in Spain: a new social and economic reality to develop in practical academic training

This work focuses on understanding how the current Spanish economic crisis is generating changes in the social and economic reality in which social work degree students are developing their practical training and on knowing if this new reality has an impact on their training and on the vision, they can create of the profession. Using a mixed qualitative methodological approach, we aim to visualize and analyze the opinions and insights that both social work professionals and students provide. Online and face-to-face interviews were conducted with social workers working as practice tutors. Likewise, two focus groups were set up and social work degree students at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain) were also interviewed. The main results show that the new scenario creates a debate not only among professionals, but also among the students themselves. They value this stage as an opportunity to rethink their future professional practice. This article may be applicable to the European context, given that the economic crisis is affecting, to a greater or lesser extent, on the different welfare states in Europe.     

Recent Developments in Welfare to Work in Hong Kong

Summary

The Asian financial crisis (1997) has created a social care crisis resulting in rising unemployment, poverty, income inequalities and homelessness. Although faced with dwindling public finances, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government had been compelled to tackle these problems. However, it has been attracted to the neo-liberal recipe: changing the subvention system to a block grant, curbing social spending, and tightening eligibility for social assistance. Notably, the introduction of the Intensive Employment Assistance Projects (IEAPs), which are the first welfare to work programs in East Asia, has become a major policy tool. This paper reports on a study of the impact of the projects, one of the key pillars for welfare to work programs. The IEAPs were found to have brought about positive changes in welfare clients' motivation to work and sense of self-reliance. Social workers from both traditional and progressive NGOs have etched, in various ways, their place in the welfare to work programs and contributed to the debate on welfare reform in Hong Kong.     

Creative Solutions and Development for Social Workers Treating People with Serious Mental Illness - Contributions from Supervision

Social workers who are engaged in a therapeutic work with clients who have serious mental illness often face specific challenges and find themselves in crisis states in therapy, which stem from the return of the clients’ symptoms and their cognitive impairments as well as social stigma. These crisis states cause dramatic changes in the way social workers mentalize their clients and they are propelled to draw from covert, unformulated, and dissociated knowledge that they have about the client’s experience, which contributes to achieving new, surprising, and creative ways to mentalize the client. Such crisis resolutions enhance therapists’ personal and professional development and serve as an identification model for their clients.     

An Outcome Evaluation of a Problem-Based Learning Approach With MSW Students

In this article, we report the findings from a study exploring the effects of a problem-based learning (PBL) approach to teaching and learning on learning outcomes for master’s of social work (MSW) students. Students who participated in a PBL pilot project were compared with students who did not participate in 5 outcome areas: social work knowledge, values, and skills; confidence in practice skills; confidence in learning skills; motivation to engage in deep learning and use deep-learning strategies; and satisfaction with their MSW education. PBL and non-PBL approaches were equally effective in helping students learn social work skills, knowledge, and values and in developing learning skills; the non-PBL group reported a significant shift to a more situational approach to their learning.     

高职院校心理危机干预中启动社会支持系统的必要性研究

新环境的适应不良、性心理的不成熟、人际交往困惑、现实社会和自己的期望不符、学习困难、就业前景严峻、家庭经济困难的压力等等造成大学生心理危机的增多。社会支持系统与大学生的身心健康有着密切的关系,社会支持能够有效预防危机的形成,能够配合危机干预工作更好地达到目的。因此对社会支持系统的利用是大学生心理危机干预系统的重要内容和发展的必然趋势。