Poetically Teaching/Doing the Profession of Social Work as a Joyful UnDisciplined Discipline-Jumper and Genre-Jumper 1

• Main Author: Dr. Si Transken
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Windsor 2018-12-01
• Series: Critical Social Work
• Online Access: https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/csw/article/view/5646

...We expect our students to upgrade their knowledge and skills over their careers, yet do not help them acquire effective self-directed learning skills. There is little integration of knowledge in social work education or coordination of teaching. The curriculum is broken into individual parts - policy, methods, research – with few efforts to integrate them. There is a lack of integration between class and field. There has long been an ‘add-on’ approach in social work education, in which we simply add new content, resulting in an unintegrated and (often) indigestible mix. This fragmentation gets in the way of learning (e.g. seeing the interrelationships among different areas). Obscurantism abounds... Key aims espoused often remain undefined... ...because there are different views about what social justice is, pursuing vague, related outcomes inevitably involves imposing some people’s view of social justice on others. (Gambrill, 1997, p. 320) Social Workers are employed in non-profit organizations, government offices, and in private practice. We engage with individuals, families, groups, communities. Social workers 2 engage with people in every phase of the life cycle; in every community; in every lie and truth told to, and by, humans. We do international work with relief or disaster care organizations. We are the people touching the troubles of the whole world; and all those worlds of troubles touch the insides of us. One of my students concisely summarized some of the problematics of our profession. We’re seen, she said, as: “Child / Baby snatchers. Bleeding hearts. Women/female. Intrusive. Controlling. Uncaring. Unnerving. Bound by rules and regulations. Condescending. Or: we’re not acknowledged at all!”