Enhancing social work students’ learning experience and readiness to undertake practice learning.

This project set out to evaluate the effectiveness of social work education by analysing student perceptions of the strengths and limitations of their education and training on the Bachelor of Social Work, Queen’s University, Belfast (QUB) at different stages of their ‘learning journey’ through the programme.
The author’s primary aim in undertaking this study was to contribute evidence-based understanding of the challenges and opportunities students identified themselves within contemporary practice environments. A secondary aim was to test the effectiveness of key approaches, theories and learning tools in common usage in social work education. The authors believe the outcomes generated by the project demonstrate the value of systematically researching student perceptions of their learning experience and feel the study provides important lessons which should help to inform the future development of social work education not only locally but in other parts of the UK.

Irish Social Work and Social Care Law

Irish Social Work and Social Care Law is a new textbook that introduces students to the law governing the practice of social work and social care in Ireland. The book provides a clear and concise guide to both the legal framework and the substantive law relating to social care and social work. It presents social care and social work law in an accessible manner, focussing on the specialist functions performed by social care professionals such as child protection, adopting and fostering, disability and mental health. It also considers the broader issues that affect service users in a social care context such as domestic violence, youth justice and the asylum system.

Developing a social work curriculum on political conflict – Findings from an IASSW funded project

This paper presents the findings from an innovative project funded by the
International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and undertaken by
an international team of academics investigating the development of a global
curriculum for social work in the context of political conflict. Coupled alongside
the emerging research and literature on the subject, our small-scale survey
findings indicate support for the need for social work educators to address
political conflict more systematically within social work curricula at both
undergraduate and post-qualifying levels of social work education. The paper
illuminates the opportunities for creative pedagogy whilst also examining the
threats and challenges permeating the realisation of such initiatives. In this way,
the implementation of a proposed curriculum for political conflict is given meaning within the context of IASSW’s Global Standards for social work education. Given the exploratory nature of this project, the authors do conclude that further research is warranted in regard to potential curriculum development and suggest using a comparative case study approach with more in-depth qualitative methods as a way to address this.

Building partnerships in social work education: Towards achieving collaborative advantage for employers and universities

Summary: Better partnership working between employers and academic institutions has recently been identified as one of the key developments needed to improve social work education and practice in the UK (Social Work Reform Board, 2010). However, the praxis of collaborative working in social work education remains under-researched and it is unclear what factors are significant in promoting effective partnership. This article contributes to this debate by reporting research that examined the experience of social work academics working with employers to deliver qualifying level social work education in Northern Ireland.

Findings: This analysis explores key factors in the dynamics of the collaborative process and identifies both congruence and discord in academic and employer perspectives. The findings highlight the collaborative advantage accruing from partnership working, which include the benefits of a centrally coordinated system for the management and delivery of practice learning. However, the results also indicate that engaging in partnership working is a complex process that can create conflict and tensions, and that it is important to ground collaborations in realistic expectations of what can be achieved.

Application: This article identifies opportunities for achieving collaborative advantage and the challenges. It identifies lessons learned about the value of partnership working in social work education and ways to increase its efficacy.

Empowering the Shamed Self: Recognition and Critical Social Work

Summary: This article provides a review of the contribution of Axel Honneth’s model of recognition for critical social work. While Honneth’s tripartite conceptualisation of optimal identity-formation is positively appraised, his analysis of the link between misrecognition, the experience of shame and eventual sense of moral outrage, is contested. Drawing on a range of sources, including the sociology of shame, Honneth’s ideas about the emotional antecedents of emancipatory action are revised to guide critical social work with misrecognised service users.

Findings: The intellectual background to Honneth’s recognition model, emanating from leading German philosophers, is described and its application to social work set out. Even so, Honneth’s model is found to be deficient in one primary regard: its assumption about the emotional antecedents to quests for withheld recognition is misapprehended. In particular, the argument in this article is that the ubiquitous emotion of shame, which Honneth argues flows from misrecognition, must be carefully addressed through the medium of relationship, otherwise it might lead to repressed shame and frustrated attempts at social struggle. To this end, a social work process is delineated for dealing with shame, following episodes of misrecognition.

Applications: Honneth’s model of recognition, along with revised ideas about how to recognise and manage shame, is incorporated into a conceptual framework for critical social work practice. With this renewed understanding of the impact of shame, following misrecognition, social workers should be better equipped conceptually to enable service users to take action for empowerment.

Beyond Individualism: Social Work and Social Identity

Individualism continues to have a notable impact on social work. The personalisation of services and the individualisation of care are just two examples of this societal trend. While helping service users to articulate their aspirations for a better future, individualism, if taken too far, undermines the social aspects of life. In response to this concern, this paper argues that social work must appreciate the interplay between the individual and the collective spheres, and its impact on identity formation, in order to enhance human well-being. To give substance to this argument, Jenkins's model of social identity is appropriated and augmented to take account of four interlinked, yet distinct, orders of experience, namely the individual, interactional, institutional and societal orders. This reworked conceptualisation is then considered in terms of its implications for social work practice.

Resilience and Burnout in Child protection social work: Individual and organisational themes from a systematic literature review

Child protection social work is acknowledged as a very stressful occupation, with high turnover and poor retention of staff being a major concern. This paper highlights themes that emerged from findings of sixty-five articles that were included as part of a systematic literature review. The review focused on the evaluation of research findings, which considered individual and organisational factors associated with resilience or burnout in child protection social work staff. The results identified a range of individual and organisational themes for staff in child protection social work. Nine themes were identified in total. These are categorised under ‘Individual’ and ‘Organisational’ themes. Themes categorised as individual included personal history of maltreatment, training and preparation for child welfare, coping, secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue and compassion satisfaction. Those classified as organisational included workload, social support and supervision, organisational culture and climate, organisational and professional commitment, and job satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The range of factors is discussed with recommendations and areas for future research are highlighted.

Reducing Child Protection Error in Social Work: Towards an Holistic-Rational Perspective

Social work in the United Kingdom remains embroiled in concerns about child protection error. The serious injury or death of vulnerable children continues to evince much consternation in the public and private spheres. Governmental responses to these concerns invariably draw on technocratic solutions involving more procedures, case management systems, information technology and bureaucratic regulation. Such solutions flow from an implicit use of instrumental rationality based on a ‘means-end’ logic. While bringing an important perspective to the problem of child protection error, instrumental rationality has been overused limiting discretion and other modes of rational inquiry. This paper argues that the social work profession should apply an enlarged form of rationality comprising not only the instrumental-rational mode but also the critical-rational, affective-rational and communicative-rational forms. It is suggested that this combined, conceptual arsenal of rational inquiry leads to a gestalt which has been termed the holistic-rational perspective. It is also argued that embracing a more rounded perspective such as this might offer greater opportunities for reducing child protection error.

Falling in love outwards: Eco-social work and the sensuous event

Summary: Social work is a discipline that focuses on the person-in-the-environment. However, the social domains of influence have traditionally received more attention from the profession compared with the impact of the natural world on human well-being. With the development of ecological theories, and growing threats to the environment, this gap has been addressed and now the notion of eco-social work is attracting more interest. This article builds on this corpus of work by exploring, and augmenting, the thinking of the philosopher, David Abram, and his phenomenological investigation of perception, meaning, embodiment, language and Indigenous experience. The implications for eco-social work are then addressed.

Findings: The development of Abram’s philosophical thesis is charted by reviewing his presentation of the ideas of the European phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is argued that Abram uses phenomenology to explore the character of perception and the sensual foundations of language which, in Indigenous cultures, are connected with the natural world. A gap in Abram’s thinking is then revealed showing the need to set human perception and language within an understanding of power. Overall, this re-worked thesis is underpinned by a meta-narrative in which ecology engages with philosophy, psychology and Indigenous experience.

Applications: By grounding such ideas in Slavoj Žižek’s construct of the sensuous event, three applications within social work are evinced, namely: (i) reflecting on the sensuous event in social work education; (ii) rekindling the sensuous event with Indigenous Peoples; and (iii) instigating the sensuous event with non-Indigenous populations.

Book Review - Social Work Under Pressure: How to Overcome Stress, Fatigue and Burnout in the Workplace

Book review: Social Work Under Pressure: How to Overcome Stress, Fatigue and Burnout in the Workplace, by Kate van Heugten, London and Philadelphia, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011, 224 pp., 

Social Work Home Visits to Children and Families in the UK: A Foucauldian Perspective

The home visit is at the heart of social work practice with children and families; it is what children and families' social workers do more than any other single activity (except for recording), and it is through the home visit that assessments are made on a daily basis about risk, protection and welfare of children. And yet it is, more than any other activity, an example of what Pithouse has called an ‘invisible trade’: it happens behind closed doors, in the most secret and intimate spaces of family life. Drawing on conceptual tools associated with the work of Foucault, this article sets out to provide a critical, chronological review of research, policy and practice on home visiting. We aim to explain how and in what ways changing discourses have shaped the emergence, legitimacy, research and practice of the social work home visit to children and families at significant time periods and in a UK context. We end by highlighting the importance for the social work profession of engagement and critical reflection on the identified themes as part of their daily practice.

Using Audio-visual Presentation to Teach Global Mindedness in Social Work Education

Direct experience of social work in another country is making an increasingly important contribution to internationalising the social work academic curriculum together with the cultural competency of students. However at present this opportunity is still restricted to a limited number of students. The aim of this paper is to describe and reflect on the production of an audio-visual presentation as representing the experience of three students who participated in an exchange with a social work programme in Pune, India. It describes and assesses the rationale, production and use of video to capture student learning from the Belfast/Pune exchange. We also describe the use of the video in a classroom setting with a year group of 53 students from a younger cohort. This exercise aimed to stimulate students’ curiosity about international dimensions of social work and add to their awareness of poverty, social justice, cultural competence and community social work as global issues. Written classroom feedback informs our discussion of the technical as well as the pedagogical benefits and challenges of this approach. We conclude that some benefit of audio-visual presentation in helping students connect with diverse cultural contexts, but that a complementary discussion challenging stereotyped viewpoints and unconscious professional imperialism is also crucial.

Internationalising the Social Work Curriculum: A Working Toolkit for Higher Education Facilities

This toolkit was collated by social work academics at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), United Kingdom in collaboration with social work educators nationally and internationally who are committed to the internationalisation of the social work curriculum. The information and examples contained in this document offer a practical guide for the development and evaluation of international opportunities for students and academics. The resources were designed with diverse educational settings in mind for the enhancement of social work learning and teaching.