How to promote professional competence and identity in social work students

Background: Field placement experiences are frequently cited in the literature as having most impact on a student social worker’s learning as they emerge into the profession. Placements are integral to the development of practice competence and in acquiring a sense of social work identity. However research on the effectiveness of educational strategies used to deliver learning and assess competence during placement are scarce. Internationally, pressures to meet increasing numbers of student enrolments have raised concerns about the potential impact on the quality of placements and practice teaching provided. These pressures may also impact on the appropriate transfer and application of learning to the student’s practice.
Aim: To identify learning activities rated most useful for developing professional practice competence and professional identity of social work students.
Method: Data were collected from 396 students who successfully completed their first or final placement during 2013-2014 and were registered at one of two Universities in Northern Ireland. Students completed a self-administered questionnaire which covered: placement setting and service user group; type of supervision model; frequency of undertaking specific learning activities; who provided the learning; which activities contributed to their developing professional competence and identity and their overall satisfaction.
Our findings confirmed the centrality of the supervisory relationship as the vehicle to enable quality student learning. Shadowing others, receiving regular supervision and receiving constructive feedback were the tasks that students reported as ‘most useful’ to developing professional identity, competence and readiness to practice. Disturbingly over 50% of students reported that linking practice to the professional codes, practice foci and key roles were not valued as ‘useful’ in terms of readiness to practice, feeling competent and developing professional social work identity. These results offer strong insights into how both the University and the practice placement environment needs to better prepare, assess and support students during practice placements in the field.

Masks as self-study. Challenging and sustaining teachers’ personal and professional personae in early–mid career life phases

Drawing on previous research identifying how teachers’ capacities to sustain their effectiveness in different phases of their professional lives are affected positively and/or negatively by their sense of identity, this paper illuminates three early–mid career teachers’ self-study inquiries, centring on mask work. The creative development of individual masks discloses teachers’ complex, occasionally
dislocated narratives of personal/professional identity. Subsequent improvisation with their masks is shown to engage teachers emotionally with tensions and dissonances within and between their various personae and personal, professional and political contexts at each of their respective career life phases. Storylines ultimately become reframed and, in a number of instances, lay claim to reinvigorated commitment, self-determination and initiatives for change.

Business partners and working the pumps: Human resource managers in the recession

This article examines the work and roles of HR managers in the Irish recession. It tests the validity of three competing views about the future of HR: that the profession needs to become a business partner; that it is knee-deep in a legitimacy crisis; and that it is fragmenting by being unable to cope with the complexity of modern organizational life. Three key findings emerge from the research. First, HR managers have gained greater influence in business decision-making, but much of this influence arises from short-run retrenchment measures. Second, many HR managers remain committed to long established professional values and ideas of good practice. Third, modern HR managers are developing a professional identity that allows them to perform multiple, competing roles. These findings challenge existing arguments about the effects of the current recession. They also speak to ongoing debates about changing HR roles by showing how HR managers remain adept at making pragmatic adaptations to secure their role in organizational life. © The Author(s) 2012.

Educating the dental team:exploring perceptions of roles and identities

Interprofessional education (IPE) should help to promote a team-based approach to professional practice but there are barriers to its implementation including professional identity. The aim of this study was to use a qualitative research methodology to explore dental and dental care professional (DCP) students' perceptions of professional roles and identities in the dental team. Data were collected by means of focus groups from a purposive sample of dental and DCP students and were audio recorded, transcribed and analysed using an explanatory framework. Five common themes emerged around the issue of professional roles and identity in the dental team. The results indicate that professional identity was an important factor in team development and was determined by direct responsibility for patient care and by the amount of clinical experience acquired. Professional identity within a team context was perceived as different from professional identity per se. Dental students were found to lack confidence in their role as team leaders which was related to their lack of knowledge of team roles, responsibilities and experience. The role of the dental technician was perceived as 'outside' the dental team due to lack of patient interaction.

"Should I prioritize medical problem solving or attentive listening?": the dilemmas and challenges that medical students experience when learning to conduct consultations

Objective: Communication skills can be trained alongside clinical reasoning, history taking or clinical examination skills. This is advocated as a solution to the low transfer of communication skills. Still, students have to integrate the knowledge/skills acquired during different curriculum parts in patient consultations at some point. How do medical students experience these integrated consultations within a simulated environment and in real practice when dealing with responsibility?

Methods: Six focus groups were conducted with (pre-)/clerkship students.

Results: Students were motivated to practice integrated consultations with simulated patients and felt like 'real physicians'. However, their focus on medical problem solving drew attention away from improving their communication skills. Responsibility for real patients triggered students' identity development. This identity formation guided the development of an own consultation style, a process that was hampered by conflicting demands of role models.

Conclusion: Practicing complete consultations results in the dilemma of prioritizing medical problem solving above attention for patient communication. Integrated consultation training advances this dilemma to the pre-clerkship period. During clerkships this dilemma is heightened because real patients trigger empathy and responsibility, which invites students to define their role as doctor.

Practice Implications: When training integrated consultations, educators should pay attention to students' learning priorities and support the development of students' professional identity.

An examination of student and provider perceptions of voluntary sector social work placements in Northern Ireland

Practice based learning in Northern Ireland is a core element of social work education and comprising 50% of the degree programme for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This article presents evidence about the perceptions of practice learning from voluntary sector/non-government organisation (NGO) placement providers and final year social work students on social work degree programmes in Northern Ireland in 2011. It draws on data from 121 respondents from189 final year students and focus group interviews with voluntary sector providers offering 16% (85) of the total placements available to students. The agencies who participated in the research study provide a total of 55 PLOs to social work students, and are therefore fairly representative in terms of voluntary sector (NGO) provision. The article locates these data in the context of practice learning pedagogy and the changes introduced by the Regional Strategy for Practice Learning Provision in Northern Ireland 2010–2015. Several themes emerged including; induction, support and guidance, practice educator/student relationship, professional identity and confidence in risk assessment and decision-making. Social work educators, placement providers and employers must be cognisant of newly qualified social workers’ needs in terms of consolidating knowledge within the formative stages of their professional development.

Undergraduate interprofessional education using high-fidelity paediatric simulation

BACKGROUND: High-fidelity simulation is becoming increasingly important in the delivery of teaching and learning to health care professionals within a safe environment. Its use in an interprofessional context and at undergraduate level has the potential to facilitate the learning of good communication and teamworking, in addition to clinical knowledge and skills.

METHODS: Interprofessional teaching and learning workshops using high-fidelity paediatric simulation were developed and delivered to undergraduate medical and nursing students at Queen's University Belfast. Learning outcomes common to both professions, and essential in the clinical management of sick children, included basic competencies, communication and teamworking skills. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation was undertaken using published questionnaires.

RESULTS: Quantitative results - the 32-item questionnaire was analysed for reliability using spss. Responses were positive for both groups of students across four domains - acquisition of knowledge and skills, communication and teamworking, professional identity and role awareness, and attitudes to shared learning. Qualitative results - thematic content analysis was used to analyse open-ended responses. Students from both groups commented that an interprofessional education (IPE) approach to paediatric simulation improved clinical and practice-based skills, and provided a safe learning environment. Students commented that there should be more interprofessional and simulation learning opportunities.

DISCUSSION: High-fidelity paediatric simulation, used in an interprofessional context, has the potential to meet the requirements of undergraduate medical and nursing curricula. Further research is needed into the long-term benefits for patient care, and its generalisability to other areas within health care teaching and learning.

The making of professionals: Embedded civil society development in a transition country

The paper addresses the development of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in transition settings. Caught in the balance of knowledge exchange and translation of ideas from abroad, organisations in turbulent setting legitimise their existence by learning through professional networks. By association, organisational actors gain acknowledgement by their sector by traversing the corridors of influence provided by international partnerships. What they learn is how to conduct themselves as agents of change in society, and how to deliver on stated missions and goals, therefore, legitimising their presence in a budding civil society at home. The paper presents a knowledge production and learning practices framework which indicates a presence of dual identity of NGOs - their “embeddedness” locally and internationally. Selected framework dimensions and qualitative case study themes are discussed with respect to the level of independence of organisational actors in the East from their partners in the West in a post-socialist context. A professional global civil society as organisations are increasingly managed in similar, professional ways (Anheier & Themudo 2002). Here knowledge “handling” and knowledge “translation” take place through partnership exchanges fostering capable and/or competitive change-inducing institutions (Czarniawska & Sevon 2005; Hwang & Suarez 2005). How professional identity presents itself in the third sector, as well as the sector’s claim to expertise, need further attention, adding to ongoing discussions on professions in institutional theory (Hwang & Powell 2005; Scott 2008; Noordegraaf 2011). A conceptual framework on the dynamic involved for the construction professional fields follows: • Multiple case analysis provides a taxonomy for understanding what is happening in knowledge transition, adaptation, and organisational learning capacity for NGOs with respect to their role in a networked civil society. With the model we can observe the types of knowledge produced and learning employed by organisations. • There are elements of professionalisation in third sector work organisational activity with respect to its accreditation, sources and routines of learning, knowledge claims, interaction with the statutory sector, recognition in cross-sector partnerships etc. • It signals that there is a dual embeddedness in the development of the sector at the core to the shaping the sector’s professional status. This is instrumental in the NGOs’ goal to gain influence as institutions, as they are only one part of a cross-sector mission to address complex societal problems The case study material highlights nuances of knowledge production and learning practices in partnerships, with dual embeddedness a main feature of the findings. This provides some clues to how professionalisation as expert-making takes shape in organisations: • Depending on the type of organisations’ purpose, over its course of development there is an increase in participation in multiple networks, as opposed to reliance on a single strategic partner for knowledge artefacts and practices; • Some types of organisations are better connected within international and national networks than others and there seem to be preferences for each depending on the area of work; • The level of interpretation or adaptation of the knowledge artefacts is related to an organisation’s embeddedness locally, in turn giving it more influence within the network of key institutions; An overreaching theme across taxonomy categories (Table 1)is “professionalisation” or developing organisational “expertise”, embodied at the individual, organisational, and sector levels. Questions relevant to the exercise of power arise: Is competence in managing a dual embeddedness signals the development of a dual identity in professionalisation? Is professionalisation in this sense a sign of organisations maturing into more capable partners to the arguably more experienced (Western) institutions, shifting the power balance? Or is becoming more professional a sign of domestication to the agenda of certain powerful stakeholders, who define the boundaries of the profession? Which dominant dynamics can be observed in a broadly-defined transition country civil society, where individual participation in the form of activism may be overtaking the traditional forms of organised development work, especially with the spread of social media?

Possibility and agency in Figured Worlds: Becoming a ‘good doctor’

Context: Figured Worlds is a socio-cultural theory drawing on Vygotskian and Bakhtinian traditions, which has been applied in research into the development of identities of both learners and teachers in the wider education literature. It is now being adopted in medical education.

Objective: The objective of this paper is to show what Figured Worlds can offer in medical education. Having explained some of its central tenets, we apply it to an important tension in our field.

Application: The assumption that there is a uniform ‘good doctor’ identity, which must be inculcated into medical students, underlies much of what medical educators do, and what our regulators enforce. While diversity is encouraged when students are selected for medical school, pressure to professionalise students creates a drive towards a standardised professional identity by graduation. Using excerpts from reflective pieces written by two junior medical students, we review the basic concepts of Figured Worlds and demonstrate how it can shed light on the implications of this tension. Taking a Bakhtinian approach to discourse, we show how Adam and Sarah develop their professional identities as they negotiate the multiple overlapping and competing ways of being a doctor which they encounter in the world of medical practice. Each demonstrates agency by ‘authoring’ a unique identity in the cultural world of medicine, as they appropriate and re-voice the words of others.

Discussion: Finally, we consider some important areas in medical education where Figured Worlds might prove to be a useful lens: the negotiation of discourses of gender, sexuality and social class, career choice as identification within specialty-specific cultural worlds, and the influence of hidden and informal curricula on doctor identity.

Law and Society: Volume III: Legal Processes and Professional Groups within the Legal Field

The thriving and well-established field of Law and Society (also referred to as Socio-legal Studies) has diverse methodological influences; it draws on social-scientific and arts-based methods. The approach of scholars researching and teaching in the field often crosses disciplinary borders, but, broadly speaking, Law and Society scholarship goes behind formalism to investigate how and why law operates, or does not operate as intended, in society. By exploring law’s connections with broader social and political forces—both domestic and international—scholars gain valuable perspectives on ideology, culture, identity, and social life. Law and Society scholarship considers both the law in contexts, as well as contexts in law.
Law and Society flourishes today, perhaps as never before. Academic thinkers toil both on the mundane and the local, as well as the global, making major advances in the ways in which we think both about law and society. Especially over the last four decades, scholarly output has rapidly burgeoned, and this new title from Routledge’s acclaimed Critical Concepts in Law series answers the need for an authoritative reference collection to help users make sense of the daunting quantity of serious research and thinking.
Edited by the leading scholars in the field, Law and Society brings together in four volumes the vital classic and contemporary contributions. Volume I is dedicated to historical antecedents and precursors. The second volume covers methodologies and crucial themes. The third volume assembles key works on legal processes and professional groups, while the final volume of the collection focuses on substantive areas. Together, the volumes provide a one-stop ‘mini library’ enabling all interested researchers, teachers, and students to explore the origins of this thriving sub discipline, and to gain a thorough understanding of where it is today.

(Re)-Introducing Themes of Religion and Spirituality to Professional Social Work Training in the Land of ‘Saints and Scholars’.

This chapter begins by alluding to Ireland’s historical reputation as the land of “Saints and Scholars” and then briefly charts its demise from this position. A parallel process in relation to religiously motivated provision of health and social care is outlined. The inclusion of themes of religion and spirituality within the current professional social work codes in the USA and Britain and the framework for social work training in Northern Ireland is noted. In this context the lack of any substantive inclusion of themes of religion and/or spirituality within the Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) degree at Queens University Belfast will be situated. A series of intersecting reasons for this lack of inclusion are proposed in terms of the experience of living through the recent troubled history of Northern Ireland and a variety of biases in academic thought.
A rationale for the re-introduction of inputs on religion and spirituality is articulated in terms of the widespread resurgence of these themes within health and social care and psychotherapy literature and the new emphasis on practicing in culturally sensitive ways in Britain. The first steps to re-introduce these themes under the higher context marker of “culturally competent practice” are described and an analysis of data from the students’ feedback presented along with illustrative quotations. The dissonance between the initial misgivings of staff and the overwhelmingly positive responses of students are highlighted. The chapter concludes with a discussion of lessons learned through the process with an emphasis on how the inclusion of these themes can result in better practice for service users, including those impacted by “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland.