Frances Crawford

Aboriginal Practitioners Speak Out: Contextualising Child Protection Interventions

Abstract One month before the June 2007 Federal Government Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory some 55 West Australian Aboriginal child protection workers attended a 3-day summit in Fremantle. Their purpose as front-line practitioners from across the State was to identify how more nurturing and healing communities could be developed and supported in a climate of despair. This paper reports on how the summit was designed and on some of the ideas and concerns that emerged within this dialogical space of cooperative inquiry. The project was a partnership between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal representatives of university, government, and community-service bodies. Aboriginal practitioners identified the complexity of what was happening in their experience and where changes were needed. Integral to this participation and coproduction of knowledge by Aboriginal child protection workers was the provision of a safe space for the articulation of reflected experience. Implications for policy, practice, and curriculum of both process and outcome dimensions to considering Aboriginal views on this contentious issue are discussed.

Mirroring Meaning Making Narrative Ways of Reflecting on Practice for Action

This article illustrates the use of students’ personal narratives and ‘thick description’ in reflecting on field and research experiences in a social work programme. Narrative as an educational tool enabled the authors to collaborate with students, field supervisors and each other in building reflexive links between past, present and future actions. In telling and retelling stories of lived experience around the tasks of social work, all players were able to come together and dialogue at deepening levels of understanding. The complexities involved in taking effective action were brought to the fore by the use of ‘thick description’ in students’ narratives of an identified learning moment. In the history of social work, stories abound of the struggles involved in consciously learning by doing. Our project allowed for such stories, written by students, to be used in facilitating the development of critical reflexivity as an integral part of becoming a practitioner. Subsequently, with student permission, some of these narratives were used in field educators’ workshops. This exercise has made for a weaving of theory, practice and reflection from the perspectives of students, academics and field educators to the shared ends of improving practice.

The midwifery of power? Reflections on the development of professional social work in Western Australia

Abstract This paper explores the emergence of the social work profession in Western Australia from beginnings in the 1920s through to 1970 when the first local graduates gained employment. The authors illustrate how WAs history both connects with and diverges from patterns of the professions development in more populous states, througt, the use of interviews conducted with pioneering social workers These oral histories illuminate how gender, class and other markings of privilege and power framed, and were framed by, the education, practice, sites of practice and career paths of social workers in the early years. Two interacting themes identified in this research were restricted employment possibilities for social workers in the State and a lack of locally available professional education until the mining boom of the sixties. The paper concludes by listing six lessons for current practitioners: the transcendent importance of reading contexts; identifying and developing relevant sites of practice; maintaining flexible boundaries of professional practice; being able to articulate a dynamic value base to drive practice; the importance of practitioners in shaping education, and continuing practitioner reflexivity.

No continuing city: A postmodern story of social work

Abstract Rural social work is examined through the lens of postmodernism. Questioning modernist framings of rural social work as peripheral and deficit practice, the article offers an alternative reading that rural social work highlights the importance of reflective practitioner selves in achieving best practice in context. Working out from the actual and bodily lived experience of practitioners is suggested as a methodology of critical ethnography that might serve to bridge the gap between practitioners and academics in social work the gap between knowing and doing. Narratives of work done by a particular social worker, Don Gordon, in the Kimberley region of Australia during the seventies are used to convey the case for a postmodern reframing of social work. Practitioners need to work effectively across a range of contexts and cultures. Global social justice and humanitarian ends of social work often require local means for their achievement.

Community participation: Conversations with parent-carers of young women with Rett syndrome

Abstract Background People who have profound intellectual and multiple disabilities face significant challenges to participating in their community and are reported to have few friends. In this paper, the issue of how this is addressed by parent-carers of young women with Rett syndrome is explored. Method Transcripts of in-depth interviews with 6 families registered with the population-based Australian Rett Syndrome Database were examined, guided by a theory of social construction, for themes of participation. Results The majority of parent-carers saw social participation as an unrealistic expectation due to their daughters’ difficulties with communication. At the same time, parent-carers spontaneously recounted details of their daughters’ social connections within their local communities. This was positively associated with the presence of siblings. Conclusions Young women with Rett syndrome participate socially in their community. Encouraging parent-carers to continue with small-scale strategies that pay heed to their concerns and fears has the potential to enhance their daughters’ access to the benefits associated with friendship.

The aim of a Bachelor of Social Work

Clearly the aim of a Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) is to provide an accredited entry point to a career path as a professional social worker. Then I remember being stopped last year in a supermarket by a graduate of 1995. She just wanted me to know that the BSW experience was the best thing in her life. She had never worked as a social worker, and probably never would, but the degree had turned her life around. Working as a real estate agent she identified the people skills learned as crucial to her financial success. Beyond that the self-awareness she had gained meant self-fulfilment. Other memories play against that one. There were the three experienced workers from a major State agency. They openly stated in a first year tutorial in the late eighties, that the reason they had enrolled for a BSW was so they could join the social workers in not having to do direct client contact work. Their aim was to gain a BSW to climb from immersion in the messy swamp of practice to the clear view from the top of a mountain of expert knowledge. Fortuitously their dream of escaping from connection with clients/consumers/customers/citizens transformed by the end of their course. All three went on to engage effectively with the grounded complexities of lives. Such metamorphosis is the mark of a BSW program successfully meeting an aim of graduating people engaged with and acting in the world to the value based ends of social work such as social justice, equity and ethical practice.

The Limits of Working with Children Cards in Protecting Children

Abstract In 2006 Western Australia passed legislation that introduced a system to check criminal records and issue permits to those who wish to work with children. In 2007, the legislation was described by the minister responsible as a “powerful system that would prevent harm to children”. This paper explores that system and identifies limits to its effectiveness. The paper concluded that unless the systems limits are fully appreciated there is a possibility of a paradoxical outcome, whereby childrens lives will be less safe. It also raises the question of whether in the area of record checking a national approach is not preferable to each state and territory developing its own system.

Learning Cautious Pragmatism from American Social Work Education. Commentary on Lessons from American Social Work Education: Caution Ahead (Karger, 2012)

There is much in Karger’s (2012) article with which to agree. Australian admission standards to qualifying social work programs have lowered over the past two decades and clearly ‘‘marketisation shapes social work education in manifold ways’’ (Karger, 2012, p. 311). Karger’s (2012) paper is important in that it lays out some of the structural factors shaping our discipline. He does this in a manner urging engaged thought and dialogue by all involved in Australian social work. In my commentary, I focus on how marketisation and broader cultural changes impact on social work education and practice, and detail how the West Australian ‘‘marketised’’ situation is playing out somewhat differently from the situation Karger (2012) described for south-east Queensland. Although I have not met Howard Karger, I followed him in the doctoral studies program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Twenty years have passed, but I appreciate learning about the history and complexity of American social work. Illinois is home to pioneer social worker, Jane Addams, who collaborated with educator, John Dewey, in developing the homegrown American philosophy of pragmatism in relation to ideas about democracy, education, and civil society (Fischer, Nackenoff, & Chmielewski, 2009). I have been able to visit Hull House and the University of Chicago and can imagine how these ideas became enacted. There was a palpable resonance with my own experience of social work back in Australia and my subsequent doctoral thesis articulated multiple connections (Crawford, 1994). At the same time, there was another story playing out within the everyday life of the University, with the announcement of the possible closure of the School of Social Work. In the ‘‘corporate measuring’’ of university courses, heightened across the American tertiary education system at that time, the School’s income did not approach that of the heavily-endowed Engineering Faculty, with limitless funds for cutting-edge Internet research. I was surprised to learn that health insurers were the

Acting in the best interests of the child: a case study on the consequences of competing child protection legislation in Western Australia

With a focus on the case of CEO, Department for Child Protection v. John Citizen (2007) WASC 312, this article examines the legal issues that the case presents for child-care workers and child welfare organisations when acting in the best interests of a child. This complex case raises a number of issues regarding the issuing of assessment notices (working with children cards), what constitutes the ‘best interests of the child’ and the interplay between potentially conflicting pieces of child welfare and child protection legislation. The first part of the article provides an introduction to the working with children legislation in Western Australia and an overview of the history and facts of the Citizen case. The second part reviews the courts decision, and is followed by a discussion of the consequences of competing legislation that, on the one hand, deemed John Citizen a suitable child carer and, on the other, denied him an assessment notice that would allow him to care for children.