Teaching and learning: an exchange of knowledge in the university among students, service users, and professors

Abstract

The education system's responsibility for social workers to be is a central argument in the academic arena. The purpose of the article is to present an innovative perspective about social work education promoted for several years in the Catholic University in Milan. The education experience with students, social workers to be, gave life to a particular workshop ‘Social Work Orientation’ characterized by different and innovative activities. The experience presented focuses on relational principles such as empowerment, peer facilitation, involvement of service users, and facilitation, following the idea that teaching and learning could be a simultaneous process. Revealing is the experience of ‘service users as professors’, a meeting day in the university between students and service users, a sharing of life stories and relationships. The future social workers learn from the service users, accustoming themselves to considering the service users as people able to cope with their life situations even before enrichment with all the professional tools. The feedback collected about this experience (from students, service users, and professors) shows that the possibility to experiment from the beginning in this approach facilitates the students to become social workers oriented to empowerment and relational processes.

L'articolo presenta un'esperienza innovativa e relazionale di formazione universitaria per futuri assistenti sociali. Il corso ‘Laboratorio di Orientamento al servizio sociale’ nasce nell'esperienza dell'Università Cattolica e si colloca all'interno di un particolare approccio al lavoro sociale, quello offerto dalla Metodologia relazionale di rete. Il senso generale di questo laboratorio è quello, come lo dice la stessa denominazione, di accompagnare gli studenti affinchè si possano responsabilmente orientare nel percorso che permetterà loro di diventare assistenti sociali adeguatamente preparati. La peculiare strutturazione del corso offre agli studenti, riuniti in gruppi e facilitati dalla presenza di un giovane tutor assistente sociale, la possibilità di sperimentare e sperimentarsi in attività ad alta interazione e bassa strutturazione, e che prevedono in più momenti il coinvolgimento in aula di utenti e famigliari esperti nel fronteggiare situazioni di vita complesse. Nell'articolo verranno descritte nel dettaglio la strutturazione e le caratteristiche del corso, con riferimento ai principi che sorreggono questa idea non convenzionale di formazione

Keywords:

• teaching or learning
• professor as peer-facilitator
• service users as professors
• reflection space
• auto-evaluation

Parole chiave:

• insegnare o imparare
• professori come facilitatori alla pari
• utenti come professori
• autovalutazione
• spazio riflessivo

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Elena Cabiati concluded a Ph.D. last year, and now she is a postdoctoral researcher. Her research interests are about child protection, social work practices evaluation, and social work education. She works at the Catholic University of Milan with young students, social workers to be, in the course ‘Social Work Orientation Workshop’. For many years, she has worked as practitioner in a governmental child protection service with families and adolescents and young people on probation. She also works as facilitator in self/help groups of parents who have a parental authority process about their children. In the last years, she took part in international research projects, publishing contributions about these experiences.

Notes

1. About the model, see Shulman (2005).

2. Social workers are facilitators of relationality: they have a role, and they perform it, but it is supervisory and facilitatory in nature rather than being manipulative and technical (Folgheraiter, 2012).