Anne Quinney

'Placements online': Student experiences of a website to support learning in practice settings

Social work practice and education in many parts of the world are implementing an elearning agenda. This article considers the experiences of students using a website developed to support learning in agency settings to discover if and how it can be used to create a ‘bridge’ between the learning environments of the university and practice. The website contains a range of features, including downloadable practice assessment documents, links to university based teaching units, electronic personal notification of placement allocation, and an asynchronous discussion forum. The action research project which informs this article employed focus groups of students to ascertain their expectations and experiences of the website, in particular the asynchronous discussion forum facility, prior to and on completion of the 80 day placement, combined with analysis of the actual usage patterns and content. Three quarters of the cohort participated in the discussion forum and findings suggest that students used and valued the discussion forum for its ability to enable the student to student and tutor to student relationships underpinning collaborative learning to be maintained during the placement, and to enable resource sharing and networking.

Student and Staff Experiences of Using a Virtual Community, Wessex Bay, to Support Interprofessional Learning: Messages for Collaborative Practice

Interprofessional Education (IPE) is a feature of many social work curricula and whilst content is difficult enough to agree, implementation raises further challenges. In 2006/7, IPE was introduced for six undergraduate professionally qualifying programmes, including social work, at Bournemouth University. Challenges included moving beyond shared teaching to collaborative learning; providing parity of learning experience for large student numbers (n = 600+) unevenly spread between professions across a wide geographical area; and supporting staff in adapting to changing learning and teaching practices. Embracing opportunities for technology supported learning, a virtual town known as Wessex Bay was developed in partnership with service users and carers and embedded in the IPE curriculum, accessed through the university Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), Blackboard. Populated by providers of health and social care services, service users and carers and other residents, it enables the facilitation of interprofessional learning and collaborative practice using evolving scenarios. Evaluation using an iterative action research approach was undertaken. Emerging themes for both staff and students include technology issues, teaching and learning strategies, and professional identity. This paper discusses some of the implications for technology supported learning in situations where social work students are engaged in IPE.

Praxis and reflexivity for interprofessional education: towards an inclusive theoretical framework for learning

Abstract While there is growing evidence of theoretical perspectives adopted in interprofessional education, learning theories tend to foreground the individual, focusing on psycho-social aspects of individual differences and professional identity to the detriment of considering social-structural factors at work in social practices. Conversely socially situated practice is criticised for being context-specific, making it difficult to draw generalisable conclusions for improving interprofessional education. This article builds on a theoretical framework derived from earlier research, drawing on the dynamics of Dewey’s experiential learning theory and Archer’s critical realist social theory, to make a case for a meta-theoretical framework enabling social-constructivist and situated learning theories to be interlinked and integrated through praxis and reflexivity. Our current analysis is grounded in an interprofessional curriculum initiative mediated by a virtual community peopled by health and social care users. Student perceptions, captured through quantitative and qualitative data, suggest three major disruptive themes, creating opportunities for congruence and disjuncture and generating a model of zones of interlinked praxis associated with professional differences and identity, pedagogic strategies and technology-mediated approaches. This model contributes to a framework for understanding the complexity of interprofessional learning and offers bridges between individual and structural factors for engaging with the enablements and constraints at work in communities of practice and networks for interprofessional education.

Interprofessional social work : effective collaborative approaches

All Social Work students are required to undertake specific learning and assessment in partnership working and information sharing across professional disciplines and agencies. Increasingly, social workers are also finding that they need to deal with a wide range of other professions as part of their daily work. It is essential therefore that social workers can work effectively and collaboratively with these professions while retaining their own values and identity. This updated second edition will prepare social work students to work with a wide variety of professions including youth workers, the police, teachers and educators, the legal profession and health professionals.

Theory and Practice of Community Development: A Case Study from the United Kingdom.

This paper considers the current concept of community and provides a brief overview of the historical context of British community work with reference to “top-down” and “bottomup” approaches. The top-down approach has roots in Victorian benevolent paternalism, while the bottom-up approach is associated with radical neighborhood action. Community development is considered in the context of current British government initiatives aimed at addressing social exclusion1 and health improvement targets. The strategic objectives for these include empowering local communities, developing effective partnerships, working as multi-agencies, and becoming learning organizations. A case study is presented, the ACHIEVE project, a community-based health improvement project in Bournemouth, UK. The conclusion draws attention to the manner in which community development is embodied in the governments attempt to engage in social engineering in economically disadvantaged communities.

Editorial: Practice, Sexuality and Gender — Intersections in Social Work

Since sexuality and gender are key features of human identity and expression, social work practitioners often develop individualised or field-specific strategies to negotiate these terrains in practice. Some of these conversations ‘in the field’ may not be debated in journals because of the seemingly disparate worlds of academia and practice. When this is combined with the notion that gender and certainly sexuality are often viewed as part of a private sphere wherein professional notions of the self are not welcome, what has the potential to be a rich field of intellectual interest remains marginalised. There is a need to continue to ask questions of one another about our practice and how gender and sexuality are realised. Specifically, this includes asking what the dilemmas are in working with clients when sexuality issues are present. Is the problem one of social structure or are there still taboos in the profession of social work? How do issues of gender and sexuality manifest in differing areas of practice? Does gender matter in the same way that it did prior to the feminisms of the 1980s? These are the kinds of questions that we aimed to address in this special issue of Practice: Social Work in Action. Gender and sexuality are being explored, to some extent, in contemporary social work literature and scholarship about sexuality continues to emerge from a diverse range of disciplines including the sciences, humanities, gender studies and social sciences. It is not surprising then that contemporary thinking in social work has led to theorising about gender and sexuality. In social work literature such a development has meant, for example, an increased appreciation for sexual diversity (Bywater and Jones 2007; Trotter and Leech 2003) as well as theorising sexuality as an ‘everyday’ aspect of the self (Dunk 2007). The turn towards the sexual self in recent social work literature has explored problematic sexual behaviours (Myers and Milner 2007), the issues relevant for neglected ‘diverse’ populations such as gay and lesbian clients (for example, see Thompson 2006 for anti-discriminatory frameworks PRACTICE: SOCIAL WORK IN ACTION VOLUME 21 NUMBER 1 (MARCH 2009)

Editorial: A Time for Change and Collaborative Conversations

The start of 2009 sees many changes for the journal and we would like to draw your attention to some of these changes and to engage in conversations about traditional features of the journal, current changes and future directions. You will have noticed that for 2009 we introduced a new cover colour and a new layout. There have also been some changes in the editorship with Keith Popple stepping down as co-editor and Anne Quinney continuing as sole Editor. Other changes include the terms of office of long-standing Board members coming to an end and we would like to extend our thanks to these people for their efforts on behalf of the journal which have contributed to it becoming the respected journal that it now is. We would like to warmly welcome the people who have recently joined the Editorial Board and look forward to working with them to continue to develop the journal. We have plans to introduce the iFirst facility this year for accepted papers which provides immediate publication for accepted papers in advance of being assigned to an issue and enables good practice, messages from research, commentary and new ideas to be disseminated more quickly. We hope this facility will be welcomed and that it will provide additional benefits to authors who wish to publish in the journal. The first issue of 2009 was a Special Issue on Sexuality and Gender and this theme is extended into this issue with an article from Australia by Damien Riggs and Martha Augoustinos considering some of the issues for gay and lesbian foster carers based on findings from a national research project in Australia. Voices from the interviews and focus groups are vividly captured in their paper. The authors recommend legal changes to support gay and lesbian foster carers, and urge greater understanding and acknowledgement of the diversity of family structures and, in particular, the contribution that lesbians and gay men make to caring for looked after children. PRACTICE: SOCIAL WORK IN ACTION VOLUME 21 NUMBER 2 (JUNE 2009)