Reflections on Social Work Practice
As student social workers your job is to learn what social work is; and how one does it. We are all learner social workers of course. Our regulating body expects us to engage in Continuous Professional Development, that is to say, in post qualifying training and learning. This includes the enormous task of discovering the theories of social work and how those theories are put into practice. A big task and a risk also, is to actually practice social work. Social work is, at the end of the day an action and social work is done by doing. That is not to say that you are taking a risk when you do some work with a service user (client). As students on placement I hope that it is clearly understood that I expect you to make mistakes in your practice. This is the best way to learn, indeed the only way to learn practical skills. The risk will be safely held by myself as your practice supervisor.
In our practice as social workers we need always to be aware of our own capacity for self-knowledge. Socrates (d. 399BC) the Greek Philosopher famously stated know thyself. The professional use of self rather implies that the reference point for knowing someone else is knowing oneself first, last and always. Hugh England, who taught me, in his book Social Work as Art (1986) uses a lovely phrase, that doing social work involves the intuitive use of self. This involves drawing on our vast experience of life in a critical way through reflecting on those experiences in order to discover or uncover useful nuggets on which we can draw for inspiration and for nourishment for our professional social work practice. Note that important caveat; drawing on our vast experience of life in a critical way. Not all our own life experiences can or should be drawn on to illuminate our practice of social work.
Critical reflection leads to self-awareness through self-understanding and self-knowledge - which can be articulated as ‘what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how we are presenting ourselves.’ In this way we build up our self-identity which is that unique sense of self and our relationship to the world around us (Trevithick, P. 2005; Social Work Skills P44).
I would argue that effective social workers are those who know themselves best. I do not mean here in a vague, navel-gazing sort of way. Rather, as professional practitioners that we are fully aware of how we work with people because this is, of course, social work. Social workers work with people at various and many levels. So, how do we communicate our knowledge, skills and experience to the other in ways which are helpful to them and not demeaning? How do we communicate our values in terms of care, concern and respect for the other person?
I think that if we are aware of all these things that we see in ourselves then it will inform our practice and will open ourselves up to other people and to their pain. Being open will allow us to come alongside the other, and it will be a good engagement as we enter their world as much as we can. This is what empathy consists of; walking in the other person’s shoes. At the same time, and this is a hard thing to do, we must have the discipline to set boundaries with ourselves and with the other person. We must be engaged, yes, but not assimilated. We must be sufficiently engaged to display empathy and to understand where the other is coming from but we must also be sufficiently professional to remain apart, to take a step back and analyse the situation the better to be able to understand what is going on in the relationship and in the situation.
To be open to this degree and to develop as a human being as well as a social worker requires an enormous capacity to openness as well as an extraordinary ability to be self-critical without being self-destructive. I guess that what I am working towards here is that coming to know yourself and your professional practice is essentially what I would term practice wisdom. To be wise is to have assimilated a multifaceted professional and personal persona but it is more than that. Wisdom is the bringing together of thought, action, knowledge, experience, understanding, common-sense and insight, which is another way of saying understanding self. The ‘making of wisdom’ does not come all at once but is something gradually acquired over time through study, practice, experience and thoughtfulness. There are also other factors at work here and I would not expect a mature practice wisdom from any student at this stage although I might expect some acknowledgement from you that wisdom was there for the getting if only you remain open to learning.
The above ideas are what underpin what the GSCC term Critical or Reflective Practice. Being critical and thoughtful about our practice does require us to look again at our underpinning assumptions and our reasoning process. Why do we think the way we do? What assumptions did we have to make to come to that decision?
The effective social worker is an active thinker who is able to assess, respond and initiate action. However, the truly engaged social worker cannot remain outside of a relationship. The social worker is an social actor who participates in the situation. In practical terms the social worker is engaged in a socially situated relationship with their client and therefore is required to have a clear understanding of their role and purpose. The social worker is a participant whose actions and interactions are a part of the social work process. The social worker analyses situations and weighs up the evidence and they retain the necessary awareness of the way that their own participation affects what happens. At all times the social worker must be able to identify the intellectual and practice processes involved in, say, assessment. They must also be keenly aware of the many ways in which they ‘make sense’ of practice situations, often making assumptions along the way, and that ‘making sense’ of what is going on is part of the nature and purpose of their practice. Making sense is what reflecting on one’s own practice is all about.
Social work is rarely practised alone. It occurs within a community context; society, neighbourhood, agency, community of peers and so forth. Alongside the theory and the ideology, the study of social policy and the legal framework which gives us our right to practise social work social workers ‘work in ‘communities of practice’. Practitioners rarely access or use explicit evidence from research or academia. However, their are ‘tacit guidelines’ to practice. Sure, we all do some brief reading but mainly we look to the collective experience of our peers for clues as to how we ‘do’ social work. We coach each other with our experiences, we interact with our colleagues and we look to opinion leaders, managers, our clients and other sources of tacit knowledge. Again, our practice will be mediated by the demands of our organisations and the constraints of internal policies and procedures. All these experiences go towards the ‘getting of wisdom’ as well. Social workers are a part of very fluid ‘communities of practice’ wherein we are exposed to the social construction of what we may call ‘knowledge in practice’. One of the real skills to be acquired by the trainee social worker is the ability to learn from another trusted source; a colleague or mentor and to discern what is good, from what is bad, practice.
Clive Baulch February 2008