Suchergebnisse

Critical reflection is regarded as a necessary skill in social work practice. While there is extensive literature on the need to develop the skills for critical reflection, there is little research into whether discussion boards and guided critical incident questions are useful in helping social work students develop critical reflection. This article reports an exploratory study conducted about the use of discussion boards and written reflections by social work students undertaking field placement. Results indicate that, conducted within a safe learning environment, students do engage with both discussion boards and written reflections to critically reflect on their social work practice.

CPD in social work offers a unique insight into the possibilities and challenges of CPD and the issues it presents for newly qualified and experienced social workers in practice. It offers possible directions for the future of post qualifying social work education, making it essential reading for practitioners, educators, managers and policy-makers

Abstract
In recent years, neoliberal government policies relating to higher education have diminished universities as spaces of learning and encounter with difference. This article discusses a teaching project that occurred on social work qualifying programmes in two universities in Britain and Spain. The project aimed to produce new opportunities for students to encounter and critically reflect on how power relations are produced and maintained in social work practice, by engaging students in mapping the atmospheres of stigmatised urban spaces. Students used counter-mapping techniques, which aim to make visible power relations and inequalities, in order to critically reflect on their experiences of and practices in such spaces. The article evaluates data in the form of students' cartographies and narratives, and educators' photographs and reflections on teaching, arguing for the benefits of moving teaching outside of the classroom and engaging with the material, sensed realities of places where social workers work. The article builds on recent conceptualisations of atmosphere and space in social work literature, contributes to discussions of critical reflection and critical pedagogy in social work and provides examples of the use of counter-mapping as a pedagogical tool in higher education contexts.

Objective: Increasingly, people work in socially networked environments. With growing adoption of enterprise social network technologies, supporting effective social community is becoming an important factor in organizational success. Background: Relatively few human factors methods have been applied to social connection in communities. Although team methods provide a contribution, they do not suit design for communities.  Wenger's community of practice concept, combined with cognitive work analysis, provided one way of designing for community. Method: We used a cognitive work analysis approach modified with principles for supporting communities of practice to generate a new website design. Over several months, the community using the site was studied to examine their degree of social connectedness and communication levels. Results: Social network analysis and communications analysis, conducted at three different intervals, showed increases in connections between people and between people and organizations, as well as increased communication following the launch of the new design. Conclusion: In this work, we suggest that human factors approaches can be effective in social environments, when applied considering social community principles. Application: This work has implications for the development of new human factors methods as well as the design of interfaces for sociotechnical systems that have community building requirements.