Supervision of students in social care education: practice teachers’ views of their role

This paper presents findings from research about how practice teachers in social care education in Ireland view their role, in particular what elements they prioritise and what they see as relatively unimportant. The aim of the research was exploratory, seeking to discover commonalities and differences in how practice teachers saw their role in the supervision of social care students. Q methodology was used to compare the participants’ viewpoints. Twenty practice teachers, from varying practice backgrounds and levels of experience, sorted statements outlining aspects of the practice teacher’s role, during individual interviews. Analysis indicates participants had two ways of conceptualising the role. One focuses within the agency, prioritising students’ awareness of the clients using the social care service and policies as guiding practice. The second encapsulates a broader view of learning beyond the agency, focusing on the practice teacher assisting the student to integrate theory with practice and using reflection as a learning tool. Conclusions are drawn in relation to social care education.     

A Transdisciplinary Approach to Teacher Preparation: Providing Equitable Access for All Students to Learn Social Studies Content,Skills, and Processes

Abstract

Contextualized in the critical pedagogies of universal design for learning (UDL) and social justice education, our study aimed to equip teacher candidates (TCs) to provide students with equitable access to learning social studies content knowledge, skills, and processes as a way to equally empower all students to be civically engaged, and thus to disrupt the social reproduction of empowering privileged students and disempowering marginalized ones in the public schools. An earlier study indicated that our TCs did not transfer or generalize the UDL framework from foundation courses to subsequent classes or in practice. This case study describes how and in what ways elementary education faculty used a transdisciplinary approach, integrating the UDL framework taught in the foundation’s course into a social studies methods course to facilitate TCs’ continued learning and application of theory into practice. The results of this case study suggest that TCs that TCs had not yet internalized the UDL framework or critical consciousness and that these must be intentionally transferred and generalized to new coursework by the faculty on a consistent, ongoing basis.     

Teaching and learning: an exchange of knowledge in the university among students,service users,and professors

The education system's responsibility for social workers to be is a central argument in the academic arena. The purpose of the article is to present an innovative perspective about social work education promoted for several years in the Catholic University in Milan. The education experience with students, social workers to be, gave life to a particular workshop ‘Social Work Orientation’ characterized by different and innovative activities. The experience presented focuses on relational principles such as empowerment, peer facilitation, involvement of service users, and facilitation, following the idea that teaching and learning could be a simultaneous process. Revealing is the experience of ‘service users as professors’, a meeting day in the university between students and service users, a sharing of life stories and relationships. The future social workers learn from the service users, accustoming themselves to considering the service users as people able to cope with their life situations even before enrichment with all the professional tools. The feedback collected about this experience (from students, service users, and professors) shows that the possibility to experiment from the beginning in this approach facilitates the students to become social workers oriented to empowerment and relational processes.     

Oasis in a concrete jungle: arts-informed methods in social work classrooms

This article presents a qualitative arts-informed inquiry on teaching and learning in social work education. Using arts-informed research methodology and grounded theory methodology, the research analyses ten interviews of social work educators in two Canadian provinces. This article focused on how university educators use arts-informed methods of teaching about social justice through anti-racist and decolonizing lenses; also discussed are the educators’ personal and professional transformation and development within this process. The main findings discuss the importance of creating an ‘artful’ space as a platform for experiential, embodied and emotive learning, which offers an innovative, more holistic and comprehensive way of teaching social justice. This way of teaching emphasizes personal transformation, giving space to marginalized voices and expression; as well as collective co-creation of meaning and creating practical tools for future social change. The study also touches upon challenges and gaps in using an arts-informed approach, which include student resistance to alternative ways of education, expressed specifically by racialized educators and ambiguity related to assessing artful works in an academic setting. The paper ends with recommendations for social work education.     

Service user or service provider? How social work and human services students integrate dual identities

Students studying undergraduate social work and human services (SWHS) degrees may have used health and human service agencies, before and during their university education. Using services provides them with insights that are useful for professional practice. However, this article identifies that they experience a fear of shame and stigma revealing this during their studies. In examining interview data from 15 undergraduate SWHS students they recounted how they integrated their experience of being a service user into their professional development. It is argued that insider knowledge of services can provide them with valuable insights for practice. Students spoke about how positive experiences motivated them to study and provided models of effective practice, exemplifying its potential power to assist those in need. Negative experiences of service use can also be beneficial for learning what ‘not to do’. Although students found the experience of service use invaluable, they felt it was never acknowledged within the curriculum. Consequently, students interviewed in this study identified service users as ‘others’. They feared disclosing their own use of services due to perceived shame and stigma. Failing to provide opportunity for students to integrate their service user experience into their professional development creates a false dichotomy which does not acknowledge the intersection of these dual identities.     

Lifting the Lid: Perspectives on and Activity within Student Supervision

Practice teaching is central to social work education. Significant changes have occurred in the past 10 years affecting social work education in Scotland. This article reports on the findings of a small-scale study involving the audio recording of supervision sessions and the interviewing of students and practice teachers engaged in a 65-day assessed placement. The research reveals a high level of congruence between students and practice teachers in perspectives on the supervisory relationship, confirms the findings of other studies concerning effective supervision and provides some vivid evidence of practice teacher and student activity within supervision perceived to be conducive to student learning. A specific finding was the association between the use of ‘exploring’ by practice teachers and students engaging in practice analysis. It is concluded that the changes affecting social work education over the past 10 years, on the evidence of this small sample, overall have had a positive impact on the supervisory relationship within practice learning. One area suggested for further study is the potential link between ‘expressing opinion’ by practice teachers and students within supervision and the development of evidence-based practice.     

Thinking from experience in psychosocial practice: reclaiming and teaching ‘use of self’

A course based on psychosocial theory and students' experiences in practice has been taught in the UK, Norway and Quebec. It departs from the classical social work concept ‘use of self’ and aims to help novices in health and social work to understand how the social world is internalised and re-produced and the value of thinking from experience. International developments such as, competency-based education, New Public Management and evidence-based practice reduce opportunities for experiential learning. This trend has been exacerbated by a focus on anti-oppressive practice without a corresponding understanding of how oppressive relations are internalized and enacted by defended and conflicted subjects. Attempts to rectify a relational deficit through traditions of reflective practice and critical reflection are important developments, but could be further strengthened by psychosocial and psychodynamic perspectives. The course combines critical, contextual and relational thinking for students in caring professions.     

Dialogue and Challenge: Involving Service Users and Carers in Small Group Learning with Social Work and Nursing Students

This paper examines the rationale for service user and carer involvement in professional education and reflects on an initiative in which social work and nursing students undertook a sequence of joint learning in relation to mental health theory and practice. Central to this initiative was the promotion of opportunities for dialogue, both between students from different professional disciplines and between students, service users and carers. To enable this, much of the learning took place in small groups facilitated by either a service user or a carer.

Evaluation of this initiative indicated that, for the majority of social work and nursing students, learning from this shared experience had a major impact on their professional development. However, a small but significant minority found it hard to enter into a dialogue with others on a basis of equality and a sharing of their human as well as their professional experience. Some students indicated that they would have preferred a focus on acquiring more specialist professional knowledge and skills. This raises important issues in relation to the changing expectations of professionalism and professional education—and what really makes someone ‘fit for practice’.     

Book reviews

This article reviews the development of an experiential learning exercise at Kingston University, designed to involve service users and carers in assessing students' readiness to practise. The new social work degree places increased emphasis on practice learning and equipping social workers with the knowledge, skills and tools for the job. This article draws out some of the strengths and advantages of involving ‘experts by experience’ in helping students to develop awareness of self, their impact on others and effective communication skills, ultimately promoting an understanding of reflective practice early in their training. It also acknowledges some of the problems and dilemmas in providing an equitable experience for all students. The students are provided with this learning/assessment experience as part of a module in the first year of the undergraduate social work degree programme and have to pass this element of the module, in addition to the academic component, in order to progress to level two.

The terms ‘service users’ and ‘carers’ and ‘experts by experience’ are used interchangeably in this article. The Steering Group at Kingston University, involved in the development of the exercise discussed, are aware of the power and impact of language and have expressed preference to being referred to as ‘experts by experience’.     

Learning from Mental Health Lived Experience and the Influence on Students’ Practice

This study explored how learning from mental health lived experience influenced Australian social work students’ practice during their first fieldwork placement. Involvement of mental health consumers in social work education is gaining momentum, yet little is known about how this type of learning informs students’ practice. Ten social work students participated in semistructured interviews and one focus group. Findings suggest that learning from lived experience promoted social work practice that honoured the expertise of mental health consumers and privileged personal recovery. Factors such as organisational culture and supervisor attitudes were found to mediate the students’ attempts to privilege lived experience.     

W(h)ither the academy? An exploration of the role of university social work in shaping the future of social work in Europe

A controversial proposal to pilot the training of child protection social workers through an intensive work-based route in England is being supported and funded by the UK Government. Frontline, the brainchild of a former teacher, locates social work training within local authorities (‘the agency’) rather than university social work departments (‘the academy’) and has stimulated debate amongst social work academics about their role in shaping the direction of the profession. As a contribution to this debate, this paper explores the duality of social work education, which derives its knowledge from both the academic social sciences and the experience of practice within social work agencies. While social work education has traditionally been delivered by the academy, this paper also explores whether the delivery of training in the allied professions of probation and nursing by ‘the agency’ is equally effective. Finally, this paper explores the Helsinki model which achieves a synergy of ‘academy’ and ‘agency’. It suggests that there are alternative models of social work education, practice and research which avoid dichotomies between the ‘academy’ and the ‘agency’ and enable the profession to be shaped by both social work academics and practitioners.     

Notes on contributors

Ethics is a central area for professional education in social work. The main educational strategies for the ethics component in social work programmes are often a combination of explicit attention to principles and implicit grounding in practice examples (such as ‘case study’ vignettes). These approaches equip students to recognise and respond to the complexities of ethics in practice. However, they may also encourage students to understand ethics as ‘rules of conduct’, in which there are ‘correct answers’ that can be learned and applied. This paper advances the view that it is more helpful to consider ethics as a ‘framework for thinking’ about the means/ends relationship in practice. It is argued that, as a consequence, the goal of ethics education should be to enable student social workers to grasp the inherently moral nature of practice and the ambiguities that follow from this. Such a position points to the paradox of social work education, that it involves teaching about things that cannot ‘exist’ separately from their being created in action. To explore this paradox in teaching ethics, the paper considers inductive approaches in learning as a way of responding to the ambiguities that are inherent not only in the subject but also in the experience of professional education.     

Rethinking Social Work's Interpretation of ‘Environmental Justice’: From Local to Global

This article challenges social workers to expand their understanding of the ‘person-in-environment’ perspective and become more active in addressing current environmental crises. Although social work scholars have begun to explore the relationship between social work and the natural and built environment and professional organizations mandate the integration of this content into practice and education, these goals remain unrealized, particularly in the USA. To address these issues more effectively, social work educators will need to distinguish between understanding persons in their environment and environmentalism, and between environmentalism and environmental justice. This article analyzes the emergence of the environmental justice movement in the USA and other nations and its relationship to environmental racism. It presents a case study of a local environmental justice effort to demonstrate how social workers can use their knowledge and skills to make important contributions to environmental justice and sustainability. It also discusses the potential of ‘green social work’ and transformative learning theory as tools to help social work educators better equip students to make strategic alliances across professions, disciplines, and systems to address contemporary environmental crises.     

Attending to Social Justice in Clinical Social Work: Supervision as a Pedagogical Space

Although social justice is a central professional value of social work articulated in ethics codes, clinical social workers have been long criticized for not clearly incorporating this professed commitment into practice. Supervision is an optimal space within which clinicians can develop knowledge and skills to attend to the issues related to social justice in their practice. A growing body of literature emphasizes social justice in the delivery of clinical services, yet there is a death of literature on how clinical supervision can promote social justice seeking clinical work. In this paper, we draw from existing literature to identify key elements involved in social justice seeking clinical supervision. Using Goodyear’s (Clin Superv 33:82–99, 2014) learning mechanisms of clinical supervision, which consists of modeling, feedback, direct instruction, and self-directed learning, we discuss a case composite to illustrate ways in which clinical supervision can serve as a pedagogical space to advance clinical social workers’ commitment to social justice.     

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     

Intellectual property in music: A historical analysis of rhetoric and institutional practices ∗

In this paper we look at the educational assumptions that underlie the notion of learning from experience and at the specific circumstance of teaching (participatory) action research in the context of higher education. We take the view that ‘learning from experience’ is not merely a psychological mechanism, but a process of socialisation of its own kind.

By first looking at the ‘basic understandings’ of social situations and learning cultures we draw our attention to a reassessment of the significance of trivia. Accordingly, reflection on action has to pay attention to the small things in the social situation reflected upon. In addition, we use the findings from an earlier research done into what people consider as ‘real' learning and juxtapose them to the hidden curriculum of learning situations in institutional settings such as universities.

We conclude our paper by pointing to the differentiation between learning about, in and for practice.     

The foreign language and intercultural competence teacher: the acquisition of a new professional identity

It has now become commonplace to state that foreign language learning should be viewed in an intercultural perspective. The main objective of foreign language education is no longer defined strictly in terms of the acquisition of communicative competence. Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence. The aim of the study reported on here was to investigate to what extent and in what way teachers' current professional profiles meet the specifications formulated in the theoretical literature regarding the ‘foreign language and intercultural competence teacher’. To answer this question, an international research design was developed, involving teachers from Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Mexico, Poland, Spain and Sweden. Our findings suggest that teachers' current foreign language‐and‐culture teaching profiles do not yet meet those of the envisaged ‘foreign language and intercultural competence teacher’, and that patterns in teacher thinking and teaching practice appear to exist within and across the participating countries.     

Imagining Social Work: A Qualitative Study of Students' Perspectives on Social Work in China

Social work education in China has expanded rapidly since it was reintroduced in 1988. This has led to a growing body of English language literature on the development of social work education in China. However, thus far, this literature lacks an empirical foundation and little research on students' perspectives has been done. To fill this gap, this paper reports on a qualitative study of a group of graduating social work students (n = 32) from four social work programmes in Jinan, the provincial capital of the Shandong Province. Three major findings are reported. Firstly, the students liken their social work learning experience to a roller coaster ride with many ups and downs. Secondly, the cultural compatibility of western social work in China has not yet been conclusively established, while an ‘indigenized’ social work needs to be compatible with Chinese family values, referred to as ‘familism’ in direct Chinese to English translation, and with the dominant socialist political ideology. Thirdly, the future of social work is bright given increasing government support for its development.     

Special Children,Integration and Moral Education

SUMMARY: This paper explores issues concerning the integration of children with disabilities into mainstream schools and draws out the implications of the discussions for moral education. Social and personal theories of disability are reconciled to provide a basis for a moral education which bridges ‘alternative’ moral traditions. I argue that successful integration requires a moral education for teachers and pupils which encourages the development of both a ‘caring justice’ and a ‘judicious care’.