Selma Macfarlane

Teaching Critical Reflection: A Tool for Transformative Learning in Social Work?

In an Australian Bachelor of Social Work degree, critical reflection is a process explicitly taught in a fourth year subject to students who have returned from their first field placement experience in agencies delivering social work programmes. The purpose of teaching critical reflection is to enable social work students to become autonomous and critical thinkers who can reflect on society, the role of social work and social work practices. The way critical reflection is taught in this fourth year social work unit relates closely to the aims of transformative learning. Transformative learning aims to assist students to become autonomous thinkers. Specifically, the critical reflection process taught in this subject aims to assist students to recognise their own and other peoples frames of reference, to identify the dominant discourses circulating in making sense of their experience, to problematise their taken-for -granted ‘lived experience’, to reconceptualise identity categories, disrupt assumed causal relations and to reflect on how power relations are operating. Critical reflection often draws on many theoretical frameworks to enable the recognition of current modes of thinking and doing. In this paper, we will draw primarily on how post-structural theories, specifically Foucaults theorising, disrupt several taken-for-granted concepts in social work.

Craft groups: sites of friendship, empowerment, belonging and learning for older women

This article reports on a qualitative research project conducted in Victoria, Australia, with nine older women. The purpose of the research was to explore the womens experience of involvement in craft groups, and specifically, the impact of this involvement on their sense of well-being. Traditionally the health of older people has been examined in relation to medical markers of physical well-being, and often, decline. We were interested to widen this perspective to understand the impact of social connection, belonging and ongoing learning and development on the ageing experience. While the focus of the groups was on domestic craftwork, the process of coming together as a collective appeared to have significant bearing on the holistic health of the women involved. Consistent with feminist groupwork literature, the findings indicated that the women we interviewed experienced the group setting as affirming and generative in a number of ways. These include providing an avenue for mutual aid, addressing isolation, affirming individual and collective strength and wisdom, while acquiring new skills, and normalising concerns regarding health and family.

Older Women and Craft: Extending Educational Horizons in Considering Wellbeing

While the social work literature is broader and more holistic than many disciplines, we undoubtedly still limit the knowledge we draw upon in ways that stifle our creativity in conceptualising and attempting to facilitate wellbeing, which flows on to limit our teaching. In particular, the significance to wellbeing of place and social space, the value of informal networks to generate support and opportunities for reciprocity, and the inherent therapeutic value of creative activity appears to be neglected. In this paper we draw upon a small Australian research study around older women and craftmaking to explore how learning from diverse disciplines, such as critical gerontology and textile making, can illuminate our understanding of wellbeing. We relate this discussion to examining notions of ageing that go beyond a focus on illness and deterioration, to enhance positive and diverse concepts of health in the context of everyday life. We then discuss the implications for social work education, with particular emphasis on ageing, and argue that by engaging with a diverse range of disciplines, we are able to think about, teach and advocate for wellbeing in more expansive and useful ways.

Engaging with social work : a critical introduction

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the diverse and contested world of social work. It explores the key concepts and theoretical frameworks underpinning contemporary social work practice, as well as relevant professional skills and strategies from a critical perspective. In a rapidly changing world, it locates critical social work as a part of broader and ongoing struggles for social justice and human rights. Readers are encouraged to think about what social work is or should be, and what sort of social worker they would like to become. The book covers a broad range of topics, including the history and development of social work as a profession, values and ethics, theories for practice, and the fields and context of practice. Definitions of key terms, reflective exercises and case studies are integrated throughout the text. Written by a diverse team of experienced educators, this is a stimulating, rigorous and student-friendly resource.

Crafting Communities: Promoting Inclusion, Empowerment, and Learning between Older Women

Abstract While social policy and planning documents are replete with ominous warnings about the cost of an ageing population, this article tells a different story about the productive and self-sustaining networks that exist among older women in the community who do craftwork. From our research conducted in Victoria, Australia during 2007–2008 we discovered a resilient and committed group of older women quietly and steadily contributing to community fundraising, building social networks, and providing learning opportunities to each other in diverse ways. Through our conversations with nine craftswomen we have been able to articulate clear links between the theory and models commonly espoused in the community development literature and the life-enriching practices used in organising informal community craft group activities. From our interviews with the older women we provide evidence of sustained participation, the generation of social capital, and the fostering of life-long learning. While none of the women we spoke to were trained in community development and did not use language commonly associated with feminist ideology, the relationship between the informal group work with principles of empowerment and self-efficacy were unmistakeable. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for critical social work practice.

Social Work and the Natural Environment: Embedding Content Across Curricula

ABSTRACT Social work is a profession focused on people within their environments. This is reflected in codes of ethics, where our shared mandate is to work towards individual wellbeing and social change. Recently, social work literature has promoted green and eco-social work, drawing on climate change science, notions of expanded and future justice, knowledge of the link between health and the environment, and principles of deep ecology. However, if social workers are to take up their place in a rapidly changing, globalised world, rife with environmental concerns, their education must prepare them to do this. One way of doing this is to embed curriculum on social work in relation to the natural environment in already existing units. This paper describes two examples of how this could be done based on the authors’ experiences from their respective universities. IMPLICATIONS It is incumbent on social work to respond to the mounting evidence related to the environmental crisis. Social work is well placed in terms of theory, values, and skills to lead the way in developing an eco-social paradigm of potential relevance across disciplines. Social work educators need to educate students about emerging issues, such as environmental degradation. Embedding material in already existing courses, as per examples provided in this paper, provides one way of doing this.

Understanding Human Development: A Multi-dimensional Approach (2nd Ed.)

Book review: This book has much to offer social work and human services students. It covers many key theories, ideas, and debates relevant to a wide range of practice fields in a comprehensive, clearly organised, and engaging fashion. The author proposes, as on overarching premise, a “multidimensional” approach to understanding lifespan development and experiences of trauma, stress, and grief, as well as responses of adaptation and resilience across the life course. Consistent with social work values, the multidimensional approach “places an emphasis on the constant interaction of the biological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of our inner worlds with the relational, social, structural, and cultural dimensions of our outer worlds” (p. 394).

Understanding Social Work Practice in Mental Health

Book review of: Understanding social work practice in mental health, by Vicki Coppock & Bob Dunn, 2010.

Social Work Practice in Mental Health: An Introduction

This second edition of Social Work Practice in Mental Health holds true to the key premise of the first edition published five years ago about the centrality of relationships and lived experience i...

Social Work and Disadvantage: Addressing the Roots of Stigma through Association

This book explores a premise as old as social work itself, but still alive in the current context: that social work as a profession is stigmatised and disadvantaged through its association with socially inferiorised groups. My initial assumption was that the book would explore how social work might challenge this positioning, find ways to resist cooption into oppressive discourses, and generate more empowering alternative discourses in collaboration with the people we work with. With the exception of a few chapters, the book fell somewhat short of this anticipated journey, due partly, perhaps, to its UK orientation within a ‘‘social care’’ context. A number of threads hold the various chapters together, the strongest being the stigma by association experienced by carers and family members of persons with chronic illnesses or disabilities, or those who are stigmatised as ‘‘cared-for’’, or substance-using. The effects of this stigma can be profound and the various contributors make strong arguments for social workers to be mindful of this potentially neglected aspect of practice. Contributors also highlight stigma by association experienced by social workers working with marginalised groups, also an important consideration for critical practice. My frustration was that, with some exceptions, the contributors did not go far enough with their arguments for social work to take up the issue at deeper more critical levels. One of the first questions raised for me, was how the authors differentiated between ‘‘disadvantage’’ and ‘‘oppression’’*the latter term being used far less often than the former in the text. While ‘‘anti-oppressive practice’’ was mentioned extensively in the first ten pages, ‘‘oppression’’ did not feature until later in specific chapters, which were, in my view, the standout contributions. From a critical perspective, while ‘‘disadvantage’’ implies inequality, ‘‘oppression’’ goes further by suggesting active and systematic processes of inferiorisation and reduction of certain groups. Further, the concept of oppression reverses the target for change at least partially onto those occupying positions of unearned privilege and power and the social policies, discourses and institutions that maintain oppressive structures. The concept of oppression, rather than disadvantage, may have lead to a more critical engagement with social work responses to stigma by association. Some contributors present a decidedly weak version of anti-oppressive theory and practice, suggesting for example that ‘‘the sense of disadvantage . . . may extend beyond the individual to some communities, ethnic and minority groups . . . [a]nd while some seem to experience ‘bad fortune,’ it might be that a form of oppression constructs such experiences’’ (Burke, 2007, p. 13) (emphasis added). While it was exciting to consider that stigma by association might be engaged with by social workers in resisting cooption into conservative pathologising discourses, it was disappointing that a weaker response to the issue of stigmatisation by association was proposed. The chapter on drug users in the family in some ways exemplifies this response, with its uncritical references to ‘‘poor quality parenting’’. While suggesting that family support can impact positively on outcomes for drugusing children, there is also a consistent inference that despite the fact that ‘‘drug users can now be found amongst most client groups’’ (64), poor quality parenting is to blame. In a book about stigmatisation, this emphasis needs critical analysis: while the rights of families to have their needs and contributions to the care of family members was promoted, the strong emphasis on parents’ ‘‘skills deficits’’ and (in)actions (70) as causes of childrens’ drug-taking was an over-riding theme. If families of drug users are to ‘‘overcome the social stigma . . . to drug use and being the parent of a drug user’’ (74), they may require support in refuting the poor-parentingcreates-drug-users argument. The claim that ‘‘many drug problems have their origins in poor parenting’’ (76) is a contentious one, leading to questions of what the causes/origins of poor parenting might be, and which parents are considered ‘‘poor parents’’ (those living in material poverty whose children are unable to access