Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

Visualisation of concepts:
• Students make drawings in small groups, depicting concepts like
“Social Work as a Profession”. Critical reflection then follows.
Some of the drawings may be used in a discussion of social work
models, ethics and other issues.
• Students make photographs individually or in pairs, each required
to make a symbolic representation of a concept (inequality,
loneliness, identity, power, choice, dignity, etc.)
• It is useful to collect a portfolio of such images and to discuss them
with other groups. This can serve as the first step when introducing
visual participatory methods in teaching social work.
We use this technique every year in different courses (see Figure 2
and 3). It is especially effective when we split the students into several small
buzz-groups and tell them to discuss certain theoretical or practical questions
and ask them to draw an image that contains the results of their discussion.
The students value this approach, as it helps them think both creatively and
logically.
Figure 2. This picture
was drawn by a group
of social work students
in Saratov, Russia. It
is a great metaphor
for social work in
the context of global
inequality and it helps
critically deconstruct
the effects of social
work as a means of
categorising people as
clients.
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