Sue King

Resilience Among Social Workers: The Role of Informal Learning in the Workplace

In issues of key scholarly social work journals over the past few years (British Journal of Social Work, Practice and Australian Social Work), articles have addressed the importance of work-based resilience for social work professionals. To date, however, the process of developing resilience has not been well documented in the social work literature. A possible way forward lies in taking account of the practice wisdom and tacit knowledge generated through worker networks both within and beyond the workers organisational setting. The authors canvass the possibility that worker resilience could be understood as a product of the professional learning process over time, as social work professionals actively create and consolidate norms about effective practice, through testing individual situations against an accumulating evidence base of successful practice.

Self-managed supervision

ABSTRACT The growth of professional supervision in social work has been accompanied by complex attempts to theorise key elements of supervisory practice and highlight the need to further examine what constitutes supervisory support in current regulatory environments. Changes in human service organisations resulting from new public management generate a need to theorise broader patterns of support available to human service workers. This article draws on an electronic, mixed-method self-reporting study of advice and support-seeking behaviours of 193 human service professionals in 3 South Australian organisations. The findings indicate the fluidity of current professional supervision practice, with workers seeking professional wisdom, identifying practice direction, and debriefing with a range of colleagues within and outside their organisation. Accordingly, the article confirms that supervisors should no longer be thought of as the sole providers of professional advice and support for human service workers and conceptualises the workers as active agents shaping their own learning.

‘I Don't Just Want to Do It for Myself’: Diverse Pespectives on Being Successful at University by Social Work Students Who Speak English as an Additional Language

This article gives attention to furthering understandings about what being successful at university means to social work students, focusing on the perspectives of students who speak English as an additional language (EAL). It departs from approaches in the literature that focus on problematic aspects of teaching and learning. The article is informed by data from a small-scale focus group study of nine students from an undergraduate and a postgraduate social work programme in a South Australian university. Drawing on a methodological approach known as ‘Appreciative Inquiry’, students were asked how they conceptualise, experience and imagine success at university. The study found that students’ understandings of success are inextricably intertwined with their individual, family and community aspirations. These findings are discussed in the light of current dominant assumptions about the notion of success and possible directions for future research and implications for social work education.

Hunger for Movement and Action—Sue Vardon, AO

Sue Vardon spent 23 years as a chief executive (CE) in federal and state government agencies. She has an honorary doctorate from the University of South Australia and has been an adjunct professor at both Canberra University and the University of South Australia and was the inaugural Telstra Australian Business Woman of the Year in 1995. She was educated as a social worker at the University of New South Wales and worked in local government in NSW, both metropolitan and country. She held senior positions in the NSW Department for Community Services before moving to South Australia to become the Director General of Community Welfare. This was followed by the CE of the Office of Public Sector Reform, the Public Service Commissioner and the CE of the Department for Correctional Services in South Australia. She was the inaugural CE of Centrelink, which was established in 1997, and her last position was CE of the South Australian Department for Families and Communities, bringing together housing, disability, domiciliary care and family services. Included in this work was her role as State Recovery Co-ordinator and Chair of the National Community Services and Disability Administrators Disaster Recovery Group. Sue’s inspirational story demonstrates her strength of character and shrewdness in choice of strategy.

Social Work Learning Spaces: The Social Work Studio.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the contribution of a physical learning space to student engagement in social work education. Drawing on a constructivist methodology, this paper examines the findings of a survey conducted with students and staff in a social work and human service programme about their experiences of a Social Work Studio learning space. The analysis identified that students and staff who used the Studio reported that students were emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally engaged in the space, which enriched their development as social work and human service practitioners. The researchers concluded that the Social Work Studio is a useful tool for enhancing social work student engagement and increasing their confidence to address the ‘real-life’ challenges they may face as social work practitioners.