Towards authentic supervision of social workers in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Supervision of social workers has been practiced in South Africa for more than half a century. A process of authentication was reinvigorated at South African tertiary institutions in 2015 to decolonize university curricula. This process included dismantling of Western-dominated theories—also in social work supervision practice. The authentication of supervision is expounded in this article as steps in a process model devised with the aim to compose determinants and a definition of social work supervision in South Africa, in order to engender future nationally relevant inquiries into the ongoing development of an authentic body of supervision knowledge and practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Supervision
• social work
• South Africa
• authentication
• process model
• determinants and definition of supervision

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lambert Karel Engelbrecht

Lambert Karel Engelbrecht, MA (Social Work Supervision), DPhil (Social Work), is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Work at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has published extensively on social work in local and international journals and is the editor of Management and Supervision of Social Workers: Issues and Challenges Within a Social Development Paradigm (2014). In 2018 he was awarded the highest rating for a full-time academic in social work by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF).