Service user storytelling in social work education: goals, constraints, strategies, and risks

ABSTRACT

Social work education increasingly prioritizes including service user narratives as part of classroom curriculum. Lived experience has also become valorized in health and social service sectors, where service users are employed as peer workers to use their experiential knowledge to inform, educate, and influence the sector. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, this paper allows peer workers to reflect on their experiences of being invited to share their stories of experiences of homelessness and/or mental health issues as part of their work role. Peer workers note that sharing their stories is complicated: it is often understood as an expectation of their labour, there are contextual conditions that limit the ways that they tell their stories and how narratives are interpreted through larger metanarratives of mental illness and recovery. Participants discuss social justice goals they have when sharing their stories, as well as strategies they have developed to best achieve these goals. Peers also consider the personal and political risks they undertake when sharing their narratives in various contexts. These findings contribute to the field by exploring how storytelling, often considered a benign anti-oppressive practice in social work education, is actually fraught with complications, considerations, and consequences for those undertaking the storytelling.

KEYWORDS:

• Storytelling
• mental health
• social work education
• service user narratives
• lived experience
• peer work

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participants who shared their knowledge with us, and the reviewers’ helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Jijian Voronka

Jijian Voronka is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor, where she teaches primarily for their Disability Studies program.

Jill Grant

Jill Grant is Associate Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Windsor where she teaches and conducts research related to relationships in Social Work practice and Social Work education.