Towards an interactional approach to reflective practice in social work

Abstract

Reflective practice is a key aspiration within social work; being a reflective practitioner is considered to be a foundational attribute of the social work professional. However, achieving reflective practice is not straightforward. Reflection is inevitably subject to issues of memory and recall, so that the recollection of a case is likely to differ in important ways from the original instance. Moreover, giving an account of an event to one's peers or supervisors involves aspects of justification and self-presentation that may emphasise selectively and ignore key details of the original event, whether through a process of conscious omission or subconscious forgetting. This article reports on a knowledge exchange project that sought to enhance criminal justice social workers’ reflective practice through the use of the Conversation Analytic Role-play Method, an approach that is methodologically and theoretically grounded in the study of talk-in-interaction, drawing on video re-enactments of real encounters between practitioners and service users. We argue that by engaging collaboratively in this way, the practitioners and researchers learned a great deal about how practice in criminal justice social work is ‘done’ and also about the wider context within which criminal justice social work is practised.

Keywords:

• Social work
• reflective practice
• talk-in-interaction
• knowledge exchange
• CARM
• conversation analysis

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the managers, practitioners and service users who gave access to the data for this research, to the actors in the re-enactments of the groupwork sessions and to all those who attended the knowledge exchange event. We would also like to thank the journal editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

The authors state that there are no conflicts of interest in relation to this research.

Notes on contributors

Steve Kirkwood is a Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on identity and justice, particularly desistance from crime and the experiences of refugees, often involving discourse analysis or evaluation research methods. He is co-author of The language of asylum: Refugees and discourse, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Bethany Jennings is a Social Work PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh. Her interests include gender, work, sex work, identity and international social work. She has worked as a social worker in both the voluntary and statutory sectors.

Eric Laurier is Reader in Geography & Interaction at the University of Edinburgh. Currently he is inquiring into the maintenance and transformation of personal relationships as a shared ordinary concern. His more longstanding interests have been around the visual and spatial aspects of practical reasoning. He has undertaken projects on interaction in the car; work and sociability in cafes; editorial work in video production; the valuation of secondhand goods; playing videogames; wayfinding with paper and digital maps; human–animal joint action; family mealtimes and arts collaboration.

Viviene Cree is Professor of Social Work Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where her research interests include social work history, the profession of social work and gender issues. She previously worked as a social worker and youth and community worker in statutory and voluntary settings.

Bill Whyte CBE is Professor of Social Work Studies in Criminal and Youth Justice at the University of Edinburgh. He was Director of the Criminal Justice Social Work Development Centre for Scotland from 2000–2013. His most recent research has focused on young people involved in serious crime, particularly, violent and sexual offending, young people subject to MAPPA in the criminal justice system, restorative practice in serious crime and the resettlement of adult short term prisoners.

ORCID

Steve Kirkwood http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1508-0835

Bethany Jennings http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5144-6948

Eric Laurier http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8043-0710

Viviene E. Cree http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9995-1820

Notes

1 Polis is local dialect for police.

Additional information

Funding

The knowledge exchange activities for this project were supported by the University of Edinburgh, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, through a Knowledge Exchange grant.