Critical Learning for Social Work Students

Sue Jones

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446293584
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Social work agencies want newly-qualified workers who can practice as highly motivated and self-flourishing professionals. To get to this stage, social work degree students need to be critical, analytical and evaluative in their thinking, reading and writing. And while lecturers may highlight this need when marking assignments, there is limited space to explore these topics within an already tight social work curriculum. This revised second edition helps to tackle this problem and goes to the heart of these essential skills.

By using practical examples and interactive features Critical Learning for Social Work Students will help guide you through your degree and on to becoming a fully-developed and critical practitioner. It covers key areas of critical thinking such as developing a clear and logical argument as well as the application of self-evaluation and understanding the ?professional self?. For this edition there is a new chapter on developing emotional intelligence.

Chapter 1

Developing critical questions

ACHIEVING A SOCIAL WORK DEGREE

This chapter will help you to develop the following capabilities, to the appropriate level, from the Professional Capabilities Framework:

• Professionalism
  Demonstrate ability to learn, using a range of approaches.
• Critical reflection and analysis
  Understand the need to construct hypotheses in social work practice.

It will also introduce you to the following standards as set out in the 2008 social work subject benchmark statement:

4.7	The expectation that social workers will be able to act effectively in such complex circumstances requires that honours degree programmes in social work should be designed to help students learn to become accountable, reflective, critical and evaluative.
5.2	Subject-specific skills and other skills.
6.2	Awareness raising, skills and knowledge acquisition.

Introduction

This first chapter will introduce you to some of the skills and strategies used in posing critical questions. You will work with a framework that will support you from the fundamental to the critical level of question-posing and provide you with a good bedrock from which to develop your ideas. Essentially a framework is usually provided to support something but it can be taken down once the skill level has been achieved. So it is with learning to ask critical questions: once you know how to do this you will find yourself doing it all the time without needing to work your way up the framework. Asking critical questions is vital to intellectual development because they push the boundaries of our knowledge. We may even ask questions for which we have no answers at the time. By asking them we consciously search for answers or nuances of statements that might be answers. What we experience is a ‘process’ activity, that is using intellectual strategies to attempt to reach an outcome – perhaps an answer. The importance is vested in the journey of discovery rather than in the discovery itself. It could be said that what might constitute ‘answers’ now would not do so in the future and in order to ‘future-proof’ social work our students need to develop critical thinking skills that lead to them asking the correct questions rather than seeing that there is necessarily one right answer. There are some fun activities and quizzes for you to do in this chapter too.

By the end of this chapter you will be able to:

• create questions that will lead you to be more critical in composing your assignments;
• reflect on how to move from fundamental question-posing to critical question-posing;
• judge your current critical questioning abilities;
• use your critical learning log to identify areas for further development.

Four question types as a ‘scaffold’ to critical questioning

The first stage in critical learning is the ability to pose critical questions. It is easier to begin by thinking about where critical questions come from. The journey begins by starting with the basics; for example, these would be your fundamental ideas and moving through how these connect to each other and to other ideas. The next stage is to link these connecting ideas to create an hypothesis. This is about how the quality of your thinking moves on to consider broader and deeper implications, and how you can defend these based on what you now know. The final stage is to consider what is known but also what might not be known; the nuances or shades within your knowledge and the dilemmas this might create for you. In social work this stage would take in the social, cultural, political and economic agendas, causing us to view each situation from a multidimensional perspective. This is referred to as the critical stage because it demonstrates a critique of the expanse and rigour of learning.

(This four-stage questioning analysis has been developed from an idea at http://academic.cuesta.edu/acasupp/as/622.htm Counselling and Development Centre, 145 Behavioural Sciences Building, York University 4700 Keele St, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3.)

ACTIVITY 1.1

Look at the following table and see if you can position where you think you are at present. Begin your learning log by writing what stage you think you are at and why.

For example, what sort of comments are you receiving on your academic work? Set yourself a task to improve to the next level by writing out questions for each level for your next assignment question.

Table 1.1 Stages towards asking critical questions

Here is an example that may help you.

ACTIVITY 1.2

Lone mothers

Q Consider the position of lone mothers and whether they are supported or penalised by current government policy.

Fundamental questions you might ask yourself.

What is current government policy about lone mothers?
Why was it created?
Is it helpful to them or not?

Connecting questions you might ask yourself.

What societal ideas promoted the policy development?
Is the policy based on sound evidence?
What do lone mothers think about the helpfulness of the practice promoted by the policy?

Hypothesis questions you might ask yourself.

How could I assess the ‘fit’ between the policy and the practice from the government’s and the lone mother’s perspective?
What effect does the policy and practice have on other stakeholders, e.g. fathers, employers, schools, the economy, children’s (perceived) potential?
How successful have the implementation and effect been for the government and lone mothers?

Critical questions you might ask yourself.

Can I propose a challenge, offer a potential solution, and raise further questions, for example about morality and the ethics of compulsion?
What theories might I use to offer an explanation of why I think this situation occurred?
How can I use these theories to underpin or lead my argument and also link this into a practice element that I could use on placement?

Comment

Here are some possible answers that might result from these different types of questioning. These are short examples only but they give you the gist of the type of responses that the questions promote.

Fundamental answer

I know that government policy on lone mothers focuses on giving opportunities for work to lift them out of poverty.

Connecting answer

I know that government policy promotes this view of lone mothers because they are blamed for raising delinquent youths due to having no male disciplinarian. The view is that these women perpetuate a circle of dependency by being claimants and by raising children who underachieve and then find it difficult to obtain work.

Hypothesis answer

I also know that there is no evidence to suggest that delinquency resides with lone mother households. I have read that income maintenance for this group is inadequate. There is no access to affordable childcare, absent fathers fail to accept responsibility for their children, employers are inflexible, and part-time work is poorly paid and insecure. This leads to lone mothers being stigmatised by social policy and media promulgation of blame.

Critical answer

In addressing the effect of government policy on lone mothers it is clear that the argument is strongly weighted towards a system that penalises vulnerable women [evidence this] who may already be earnestly seeking employment and those who, after considered thought, make a decision to remain unemployed while their children are young. Evidence suggests [give a reference here] that the social construction of ‘motherhood’ and of ‘lone mothers’ is increasingly creating a blame culture that fails to recognise the need for more appropriately targeted equality measures. These would include better community networks, advocacy and mediation services, sustainable support of income maintenance and challenging the role of women as being the only carers of children through a cabinet-level office of Minister for Women. These strategies would raise the profile of lone women carers as nurturers of the next generation and expose the current oppressive policy/practice. A newly created discourse on lone motherhood would make connections between feminist theories of the rights of women, the labelling from societal discourse about women as lone mothers, and the position of children and young people as our next parental generation. In this way the binary of middle-class male dominance would be challenged by an oppositional binary of working women and their rights to accessible and appropriate support as of right, and not because they are inadequate, weak and dependent members of society.

You will see that the answers to the fundamental and connecting questions are not wrong but they lack any depth. They can be said to be surface-level answers. They might be useful in an introduction or in setting the scene.

The hypothesis response begins to broaden out the answer to consider the position of others within the debate, and of how opinion-makers in powerful and influential positions perpetuate ideas about others who are in less powerful or oppressed positions. This is not to say that all lone mothers feel this but that the odds are stacked against them. This response would demonstrate that you are able to take a ‘helicopter view’ (DeBono, on www.mindtools.com) and broaden your understanding by questioning what you read, making evidenced links and applying your new knowledge to practice.

You would be contemplating what ...