Searching for a Capacity Building Model in Social Work Education in China

This paper contains our reflections about our experiences in employing a capacity building model for training social workers to conduct community development work in rural China. Unlike the conventional approach to social work practicum, our approach advocates an educational practice of capacity building; not only for local people and learners, but for educators as well. It stresses that the educator should assume a non‐expert role in relating to his/her students so that the students will do the same with local people. We challenge the concept of the social work educator as an expert because it gives a teacher the power and authority to dominate students, which disempowers students during the learning process. In the same vein, we challenge the desire of social work students to become experts in rural development, which in turn disempowers local people from taking charge of the future direction of their lives in rural China. The capacity building approach subscribes to a critical pedagogy that calls for a re‐invention of self by challenging tradition and culture, and by developing academic knowledge, the habit of inquiry and critical curiosity about society, power, inequality, and social change.     

Self-reflexive Student Research and its Implications for Social Work Education

This paper presents a thematic analysis of postgraduate social work student research on refugee and migrant experiences in Aotearoa New Zealand, collected in the last decade from one university social work programme. The focus is on the ways in which students located themselves in relation to their research, which explored diverse facets of refugee and migrant experience and was invariably connected in some way to their own experiences. Students not only learnt to conduct qualitative research, but also found that having been drawn to locate themselves within it for ethical reasons, their self-reflexive stance had enabled greater personal learning and in some cases, healing. This added greatly to their professional development and through the collation of their research reports it can be shown that for students, locating themselves in relation to their research may be a worthwhile part of learning to be a professional social worker.     

Social Work Students' Pre-placement Anxiety: An International Comparison

This paper compares the degree and nature of anxiety experienced by American and Israeli social work students as they anticipate beginning field placement. Despite having greater prior exposure to social work through relevant coursework and experience, American students were significantly more anxious than Israeli ones. Overall, Americans reported a slightly higher sense of preparedness, but this difference was not statistically significant. While there were some shared worries, notably regarding the quantity and quality of field instruction, and their capacity to meet both field and academic obligations, specific concerns regarding field agencies, clients, and social work education differed between the groups, likely reflecting the distinct social, cultural, historical and educational contexts. Implications for social work education and future research are discussed.     

In Memoriam

This article discusses the origin of social work education in Africa as an export of colonial powers. Social work or social work education has not been the product of a progressive social metamorphosis but rather that of foreign methodologies imposed on African societies. Consequently, the essence of social work education lacks relevance in terms of its philosophical, value and ideological base. Thus students who graduate from such a system of education tend to remain, to some extent, unfamiliar with indigenous knowledge systems and lack adequate knowledge in working with the people. The paper further argues that, while the origin of social work education is well known, its future direction, development and focus on the continent remain unknown, at worst haphazard, ad hoc and undirected with serious implications for the mission and vision of the profession. Social work in Africa has been without a platform to foster discourse on its nature, character and direction. Transformation of social work education from being Euro-centric to being Afro-centric has to be spearheaded by an organization that can provide a forum for dialogue, leadership and a contextual framework. The article therefore examines the need for such a forum and briefly discusses past efforts in this direction in an attempt to provide a direction for transformation.     

Student Views on Good Practice in Social Work Education

This article focuses on the delivery of a social work degree programme in England, one of the constituent jurisdictions of the United Kingdom, and explores student perceptions of their learning experience and what constitutes effective teaching. The data are drawn from a larger research project which is ongoing and focuses upon the specific ways in which the BSc Hons Social Work degree at a university in the East Midlands prepares students to meet the demands of employers. Linked to the national evaluation of the new social work degree, social work academics at the university worked with final year social work degree students as co-researchers to evaluate student views on the quality of teaching practices across the teaching team.     

‘Meeting Face to Face Creates New Insights’: Recruiting Persons with User Experiences as Students in an Educational Programme in Social Work

Even though empowerment and involvement of users have, for a long time, been important goals for educational programmes in social work, these programmes have only to a very little extent availed themselves of the resources that people with user experiences have to offer. This article will present a course that is part of the bachelor programmes in social work and social education at Lillehammer University College in Norway. Persons with user experiences were recruited and took part in a course on equal terms with the bachelor students. Four lecturers from the college, including the author as the project leader, carried out the planning and implementation of the course. The article gives an account of the experiences gained from the course as expressed by the students.     

Becoming a Social Worker: Chris' Account

Chris Murray, a young African-American male, admitted on a scholarship to a social work masters program, reflexively explores his negotiation of difference in dialogue with an Australian female social work educator twice his age. Standpoint theory and the concept of intersectionality are used to frame Chris' experiences at a private northeast US university after achieving an undergraduate degree in his southern home state. His initial access to university came through military service. Chris was interviewed by the author as part of her international study project examining social work students' experience of diversity in the classroom. The open-ended interview was designed to allow self-identity of difference. Chris ethnographically recounts to a stranger a subjectivity statement of who he is in relation to studying social work. Chris' story works the hyphen between the binary of subjectivity and objectivity through the particulars of his personal history and world-view and his expectation that I as a social work educator share his seeking of social justice. His detailing of what moved him to become a social worker and contextual complexities negotiated along the way connect to wider discourses on how agency and structure play out in lived experience in seeking social justice.     

Special issue: Training and Education for Residential Child Care

This paper begins by locating the (controversial) removal of the ‘minimum age at qualification’ regulation in 2003 within the context of wider changes occurring within social work education and the social work profession. This is followed by a report of a small scale exploratory study designed to gather data regarding the experiences of younger students within one undergraduate qualifying programme. The data are then discussed in relation to literature from within social work and allied disciplines in order to consider themes such as ‘identity’, ‘othering’ and ‘recognition’. It is suggested from data gathered during this project that although the gates to social work education have now been opened more widely to school leaving students, they have in effect become social work's new ‘non-traditional’ students and in some cases, inclusion is experienced as partial rather than complete. A discussion of the implications for further research as well as teaching, learning and group process issues on professional programmes concludes this paper.

The initial phase of the research for this paper was funded by an HEA SWAP ‘small projects’ grant.     

Social Workers’ and Students’ Attitudes toward Electronic Tracking of People with Alzheimer's Disease

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) have recently been employed to help monitor persons with dementia. While the advantages of such technologies are clear, making use of them raises a number of ethical dilemmas. Considering the fact that social workers may be called upon to assist families in making decisions regarding the use of GPS, their attitudes on this issue are important. Fifty-five social workers and 61 social work students completed a questionnaire including: attitudes toward tracking, knowledge of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) symptoms, familiarity with persons who have AD, and ratings of who should be involved in the decision-making process regarding GPS use. Findings showed that the highest-scored attitude factor was respecting elders’ autonomy, while the lowest-scored factor opposed GPS use. The elderly and their spouses were rated as important decision-makers regarding the use of GPS. Knowledge of AD and respecting autonomy were negatively correlated. Students gave a higher rating to respecting elders’ autonomy than the social workers. Social workers gave a higher rating to the importance of a multidisciplinary team. Implications for social work education are discussed including recommendations for person-centered AD care on the one hand, and the need to balance the interests of the individual and the family on the other.