Flex reflection two

Flex reflection two

I am a social worker on a part time secondment as a teaching consultant on the social work degree program within health and social care. The trigger for this reflection was a lecture that I undertook with BA students this autumn on Community Asset Approach. This is a way of working in social work, which, is a strength-based approach to supporting people to make changes to their own lives through using and utilising their communities. This could be through accessing support from public or private organisations, charities or relationships such as friends, acquaintances and other relationships (2014).

This is a subject that I am familiar with and it is an approach that when working as a social worker. I felt that my lecture went well and that students were engaged but after the lecture I reflected on the session and felt that I could make changes to how the session was delivered which would enhance the learning experience of the students .

Analysis

I had recently completed my micro teaching session for my ILTA module. In line with what I had delivered, which had been a short lecture on Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy Of The Oppressed, I was continuing to reflect on how to make my teaching more interactive and how students could have more opportunity, within these sessions, to interact with the world. My feeling about the lecture on CAA was that it was counter-intuitive to deliver a session on a subject that was intrinsically about community, in the classroom. For me this did not allow students to be, as Freire (2005) states, ‘with the world’ as opposed to ‘in the world’,(2005:74) that is, to have a learning experience where the active participation is stressed, as opposed to one characterised by passivity.

Furthermore, in delivering this teaching I was continuing to follow the model of the ‘expert teacher’  that Freire criticises in his book. In line with Freire’s principles the session would be more horizontal than vertical, that is despite the fact that ‘any social formation –indeed any given object, person or body- is constituted by both vertical and horizontal relations’ (2014:92) (In this case, there remains a degree of verticality as I as the teacher have organised and will be running the session)

A colleague and I devised a session whereby students would take the bus from central Manchester and travel to Stockport along the A6. They would be required to make several stops to try and ascertain what resources they could, and could not, identify in the areas in which they stopped and discuss with members of the communities what they had which was supportive and what they lacked in their respective communities.

Students weren’t provided  any further guidance as the session was organised in a way that allowed students to move towards learning in a way in which ‘…. no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are ” owned” by the teacher. (2005:78)

The students would then be required to return to campus and share their findings about what communities had and what they lacked. Removing the teaching from the classroom and from the strictures of top down teacher lead sessions hopefully leads the students to develop their own ideas and think critically about what it is that they are encountering, in terms of ‘community assets’.

I hope that the session will enable students to ‘identify the obvious and the hidden messages more accurately’ (2005:2). That is, what is and isn’t present in communities for people to use and why this may be (the influence of government imposed austerity and political ideology.) I also hope that from their discussion of ideology students are able to critique this approach and its link with neoliberalism through its devolving of responsibility from the state to communities, that have, in turn already been disenfranchised by neoliberalism (2011)

The session will also allow students to develop additional skills, essential to anyone in HE  but particularly to social work students,  around professionalism and community and will also be in line with MMU University Strategy of integrating students with the communities in which they live and work.

Action plan

The action plan is to deliver a session on community asset approach with students on the social work course. The session will be based on the principles put forward by Freire and social constructivism in general, that students will learn and develop their knowledge through interaction with their environment and the people therein. The idea is to deliver a session that is community based as it centres around a subject that is about community and peoples lived experience therein. It builds on knowledge that students will posses of this area but then develop them as will learn from each other and from the experience they have in the community and will then be able to take this experience and develop it through discussion and interaction back at the campus to think critically about this particular model of working.

Bibliography

Cotterell, S Critical Thinking Skills (2005) Palgrave McMillan London

Freire P Pedagogy of The Oppressed (2005) Continuum New York

Gilbert, J Common Ground (2014) Pluto Press London

Gray, M (2008) Back to Basics A Critique of Strengths Based Perspectives in Social Work in Families in society: the journal of contemporary human services ·No Volume or Page ref available – taken from a PDF

Heather, F, Ketteridge S & Marshall, S (1999)A handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academic Practice Kogan Page London

MMU University Strategy accessed online on 18/12/2018 https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/about-us/our-strategy/

Payne, M (2014) Modern Social Work Theory Fourth Edition Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan