Lynelle Watts

An Autoethnographic Exploration of Learning and Teaching Reflective Practice

Learning and demonstrating reflective skills for practice is a key requirement for students and practitioners in Social Work in Australia. Yet teaching and assessing reflective practice continues to present a number of practical and ethical issues for educators. This paper will discuss reflective practice in the context of an autoethnographic study that researched learning to be a social worker and educator. The findings from the study suggest that educators should be cautious about the extent to which educational activities direct attention to student selves for the purposes of building skills in reflective practice. The conclusions suggest that the moral order of the discipline, the hidden curriculum and the course culture in addition to the actual activities can have a significant impact on the extent to which reflective practice assessments deliver learning benefits to students.

Assessing the Needs of Carers of People with Mental Illness: Lessons from a Collaborative Study

This paper is concerned with improving assessment practices with people who are carers of people with mental illness. It is established that the well-being of carers is negatively impacted by the burden of their caring role, and that the needs of carers are often overlooked and poorly responded to by formal helping services. It is the purpose here to report on findings from the data provided by a subset of participants from a broader collaborative research project that developed and trialled a carer’s assessment tool. The goal was to establish whether the tool was useful in practice for the purposes of assessment. This paper outlines key principles for practitioners and services to consider in their assessment practices with carers. These include an assessment process that allows carers to focus on their own feelings independent of the person they may be caring for; the importance of developing a feeling of solidarity with other carers while validating their caring experience; a comprehensive and holistic assessment process; and, opportunities to prioritise in a collaborative manner what might be an overwhelming number of areas of need or concern.

Whole Curriculum Mapping of Assessment: Cartographies of Assessment and Learning

Approaches to curriculum design often occur at the unit or course level within social work education. Only rarely have ‘whole of curriculum’ approaches been discussed in the literature. This paper describes the creation of a ‘whole of curriculum approach’ to social work teaching and learning within an Australian University. The project involved the creation of a methodology and conceptual framework to map assessment across an entire social work curriculum. In doing so, the mapping exercise provided a way to evaluate the sequencing and integration of assessment tasks across the four-year degree pathway, and judge the effectiveness that such assessments fit with theories and research on assessment more broadly, and with the graduate outcomes for a social work degree. This paper outlines the background to the 2013 assessment project and its alignment to the curriculum mapping. It argues and explains how a systematic approach to mapping and improving social work curriculums can be achieved.

The Experiences of Human Service Managers in Contexts of Change and Uncertainty

ABSTRACT Against a background of rapid and widespread changes to the delivery of human services and social welfare, this paper reports on a study into the experiences of managers of human services organisations. Within an interpretive methodology, the research utilised focus group and interview methods to examine the relevance and need for business, finance, and management skills from the perspective of managers in the human services. Results indicate that managers of human service organisations need advanced business, management, and finance skills to deal with change and uncertainty in contemporary and competitive service environments. IMPLICATIONS Human service organisations in Australia are subject to change and uncertainty with new models of funding and increased accountability. Social workers employed as managers are under pressure to lead sustainable and accountable services, while still holding to social work principles. Social workers who manage organisations face a challenge of how to integrate business, management, and finance skills with the values and mission of social work.