Critical Pedagogy in Community Practice

Contemporary community engagement pedagogies require critical frameworks that facilitate diverse groups working collaboratively toward socially just outcomes. Critical frameworks acknowledge different ways of knowing and experiencing the world, as well as many means to achieve the desired outcomes. Indigenous values focused on relationship, respect, reciprocity, responsiveness, relevance, and responsibility inform key community engagement principles that are often applicable across many groups. Instructors who center Indigenous and other perspectives of groups that experience marginalization and oppression in social work curriculum are able to create community-engaged and socially just outcomes via institutional change and knowledge production efforts. Contemporary community engagement work embedded in social work values requires frameworks that are strengths based, center historically underrepresented groups working toward social justice on their own terms, and include an analysis of power, positionality, systemic causes of disparities, needed institutional changes, and critiques inclusion assumptions.

Challenges to Ethics and Values

This chapter addresses common ethical dilemmas and “sticky” practice situations related to the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics, which plays a crucial role in how school social workers perform their job duties. The Code of Ethics is grounded in six core social work values: dignity and worth of the person, social justice, service, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. Ethical challenges arise when values or principles clash and one value will need to take precedence over another. This chapter highlight five challenges that school social workers are likely to face: competence, confidentiality, boundaries, collegial relationships, and school reform efforts.

Golden opportunities for resolving students’ emotional disturbance in learning social work values: A 3Ps approach in f ieldwork practicum

The term golden opportunities to discuss with supervisees about social work values refers to the episodes of struggles and conflicts encountered by students in fieldwork. They are so-called golden opportunities to discuss social work values with students. Limited attention has been paid as to how to seize these golden opportunities. This study explores the causes of emotional disturbance and the methods applied by supervisors to discuss social work values with their students. In total, 22 Hong Kong students in Higher Diploma Social Work programmes at three higher education institutes were interviewed. Themes identified include ambivalent feelings, methods and expectations of students. An emotionally interactive approach which consists of 3Ps (‘perceived safe and trusting supervisory relationship’, ‘process of supportive supervision’ and ‘positive and accepting attitudes of supervisors’) is proposed.

Work Values and Job Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Basic Psychological Needs at Work

This study investigated the mediating role of basic psychological needs at work in the association from work values to job satisfaction. Using a four-factor model of work values, we tested how each work value factor was related to basic psychological need satisfaction and frustration at work. The sample included 228 workers (72% female) surveyed twice over a 7-week interval. Results showed that need satisfaction at work was positively predicted by intrinsic and social work values and negatively predicted by extrinsic work values. Need frustration at work was positively predicted by extrinsic and status work values and negatively predicted by intrinsic work values. Also, need satisfaction fully mediated the relationship from intrinsic, extrinsic, and social work values to job satisfaction. These findings suggest that organizational and career development interventions aiming to enhance employees need satisfaction at work should aim to promote growth-oriented work values endorsement rather than instrumental work values.

Participatory research in a pandemic: The impact of Covid-19 on co-designing research with autistic people

Social work research should adopt a critical approach to research methodology, opposing oppression that is reproduced through epistemological assumptions or research methods and processes. However, traditional approaches to autism research have often problematised and pathologized autistic 1 individuals, reinforcing autistic people’s positions as passive subjects. This has resulted in autistic people being largely excluded from the production of knowledge about autism, and about the needs of autistic people. Participatory approaches promote collaborative approaches to enquiry and posit autistic people as active co-constructors of knowledge, a stance that is congruent with social work values of social justice and liberation. However, Covid-19 is not only altering our everyday life but also upending social research. This paper discusses the challenges faced by a participatory study involving autistic people during the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper examines how Covid-19 increased the individual vulnerability of autistic participants and changed their research priorities, increased the researcher’s decision-making power, and placed greater emphasis on barriers created by inaccessible methods. Covid-19 did not present novel challenges, but rather exacerbated existing tensions and inevitable challenges that are inherent in adopting an approach that aims to oppose oppression.

Social work in palliative care

Palliative social work is an evolving specialty which continues to be enriched by practitioners globally. Social workers practise in diverse settings and have the opportunity to extend palliative care values and processes beyond hospitals and hospices to home care, nursing homes, prisons, and senior centres. This chapter discusses social work values and core principles as a foundation upon which to integrate palliative care, creating a rich opportunity to serve patients, families, teams, institutions, and communities. It begins with an introduction to the history of social work in palliative care and moves on to discuss the convergence and synergy of social work and palliative care, and the need to create models of care to meet global needs. Assessment and interventions are introduced with attention to confidentiality, culture, family meetings, and the roles and responsibilities within team work. Finally, a patient family narrative is presented.

Co-Creating Authentic Sacred Therapeutic Space: A Spiritually Sensitive Framework for Counselling Children

Social work values client-centered holistic approaches of care, yet there is a lack of approaches addressing spirituality in counselling with children. Children’s spirituality and conceptualization have been disenfranchised. Children’s spiritual experiences, ways of knowing and perceptions are important to attend to when supporting them through an impactful life event such as trauma, grief, or loss (TGL). Parents may not fully understand or have the capacity to attend to their child’s spirituality. Counsellors appear to lack knowledge and training to attend to the spiritual needs and capacities of children. This article offers some research findings of children’s spirituality deemed to be vital for healing from TGL and counselling. It provides an understanding of some of the constructs and isolating processes described by children, parents and counsellors related to children’s spirituality in TGL. It also will present a spiritually sensitive framework specifically attuned to the spiritual dimension and creating spaces of safety and hope when working with children. The implications of not addressing the critical spiritual dimensions in practice for children are discussed, and recommendations for continued research and training for further theoretical development and future social work practice are offered.

‘All social work takes place in a macro context’: The gap between international social work training and practice

This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study combined data from an online survey with international social workers ( N = 44), and key informant qualitative interviews ( N = 6), to identify gaps and synergies between what is taught in graduate social work programmes and expected by employers. Findings suggested that although social work values align well with international social work, gaps exist between the macro knowledge and skills required for international work and that which graduate training offers. Findings further suggested that if unaddressed, these incompatibilities may contribute to the invisibility of social work as a viable training ground for practice in international aid agencies.

Casting Light on the Distinctive Contribution of Social Work in Multidisciplinary Teams for Older People

The current policy emphasis in adult social care in England is on promoting independence, preventing or delaying the need for more intensive support and the provision of personalised services. However, there is little evidence available on how social workers (SWs) identify and meet the complex needs of older service users in practice. In this article, we present findings from a study of innovative social work practice with older adults in England (2018–2019). We present five case studies of social care and integrated services in which SWs are integral team members. Twenty-one individuals participated in interviews; this included service managers and practitioners with social work backgrounds, and other professionals, including nurses and occupational therapists. Specific practices contributing to innovative service delivery included: the strong demonstration of social work values influencing the practice of multidisciplinary teams; positive risk management; importance of timing and ensuring continuity of relationships; and, the proactive application of legal knowledge to promote older people’s rights. While some of these features can be seen as returning to the ‘heart’ of social work, we argue that they are promising in forging new paths for social work with older people that turn away from more managerialist- and procedurally driven approaches.