Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

• learning and teaching about family work skills and techniques;
• preparing social work students for fieldwork placements in agencies
that work with families;
• providing a basis for discussion in supervision;
• developing staff in the form of a refresher course or where a
practitioner is new to family work or changing his or her role in an
organisation;
• showing potentially anxious families what to expect in family
counselling; and
• offering a means of understanding the powerful influence of family
dynamics when working with family sub-systems and/or individuals.
Audiences evidently differ in terms of how they capture the content and
in their ability to criticise what they have seen. Some do so from an elementary
level, focusing mostly on content and the narrative story of the family, while
others add to this an ability to critique the process and skills demonstrated, based
on their own models of practice. Ellis and Garland 40 describe working with the
teaching material, thereby giving us some tips on the teaching process:
This lesson was conducted with final year students. An instructor has shown the material
twice. On the first showing, students were asked to critique the video. Some
responded to this task by saying what was wrong with the demonstrated practice, while
others were able to identify and name skills, but to varying degrees without an informed
basis for the critique. On the second showing, students were asked to consider
how implementing a different model of practice would change the questions asked and
skills utilised. This promoted engagement with the video material on a different and
deeper level. It also enabled these final year students, who were consolidating their own
model of practice, to extend their understanding of systemic and narrative approaches
to family work if these are their preferred approaches, or to compare and contrast these
approaches with another model, for example a cognitive-behavioural approach.
40
Ibid.
74