Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

is worthwhile utilising (auto)biographical texts, photographs and pictures,
research reports, novels or short stories, and existing films and videos. 19 The
story (the pretext) functions as a starting point to a process that the teacher
activates together with the students. When inventing the story, the teacher
should remember that drama always needs tension. This means being aware of
the need to create tensions; otherwise challenging episodes, even chaos, might
follow. 20
The role of the teacher in a drama process is to operate as initiator and
facilitator; to guide the whole learning process and to construct the settings,
including the provision of appropriate materials and objects that will inspire
students (pretexts, documents, archival materials and symbols). Planning a
process drama is time-consuming, more so than planning lecture-orientated
teaching. After each period or scene, there should be an opportunity to discuss
what has been experienced. The process must be evaluated with the students;
this is the only means of getting a drama to work and of developing it. In the
course of the evaluation, the discussion about gender may well turn to the
present day, examining what has been achieved in learning about gender.
An example of a process drama: “Anna, a female pioneer in social work (in the
1930s)”
• Target group: Social work students
• Size of the group: 15–20 persons
• Theme: Gender in social work, history of social work
• Possible thematic questions: What does gender mean in social
work? How has gender become a factor in social work? What are
the historical meaning and processes of gender in social work?
• Material: Various materials of female pioneers (fictive or nonfictive)
of social work, including pictures, photographs, scraps,
chapters of books, articles, statistics and archival material.
One should also consider whether materials, symbols or objects
are needed in staging and defining the space.
19
Tips for searching stimuli for conducting drama, for example, Rob Hardy, “Doing Good and Winning Love:
Social Work and Fictional Autobiographies by Charles Dickens and John Stroud.” British Journal of Social Work 35,
no. 2, (2005): 207−220, and Colin C. Irvine, ed. Teaching the Novel Across the Curriculum: A Handbook for Educators.
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008), and Jenifer Jasinski Schneider et al., ed., Process Drama and Multiple
Literacies. Addressing Social, Cultural, and Ethical Issues (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006).
20
Bowell, Heap 2001.
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