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ABSTRACT
This article highlights the importance of learning about reflective processes in social work education, because acts of reflection enable us to learn from past experiences in order to improve our future practice. We show how duoethnography, as a reflective method, enables us, as two social work academics from the UK and Slovenia, to investigate our personal positioning and its influence on our practice. This duoethnographic study allows the authors to challenge their place in the status quo, and consider their social and political position in society. Alongside the use of duoethnography as a reflective method, the analysis of critical incidents, is used herewith to develop our personal and professional knowledge base. We consider how our own educational experience taught us to value the perspectives of experts-by-experience in all aspects of our practice, investigating the disclosure of our own self and identity in this process; furthermore we consider the importance of incorporating the perspectives of experts-by-experience in the wider professional development of social workers. Consequently, we recommend that social workers reflect on their experience throughout their professional development; and suggest the potential of duoethnography as a potentially significant method in the development of theory and practice in social work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 In Slovenia the term co-creation is used and not co-production, which is used in the UK. Co-creation is a social work concept which allows the social worker and expert-by-experience to partner in the process of co-creation to achieve effective outcomes (Čačinovič Vogrinčič, Citation2010). We choose to use the word co-creation in this article, rather than co-production, because the former emphasises to us, more than the latter does, how service users and practitioners work together to create a new outcome.
2 A community mental health team is a statutory service in the UK which provides support to people with mental health issues who are living in the community. It usually consists of a multi-disciplinary team of professionals.
3 At this point in time, in 1994, on PV’s return to this hospital as a social work student, institutions still provided a prominent role in providing care for people with mental ill health and learning disabilities in Slovenia.
4 University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social work developed a partnership with Anglia Ruskin University (Anglia Polytechnic University) to enable the second author to spend a study semester at APU through the TEMPUS program (1994–1995).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Joanna Fox
Dr Joanna Fox is a social work academic with lived experience of mental distress. Her experiences of recovery from mental ill-health are central to her teaching and practice of social work. Joanna is committed to participatory forms of research which involve people who use services and their carers at all stages of the research process. Joanna has expertise in the recovery approach, working with mental health carers, and educational approaches that emphasise the perspective of experts-by-experience and their carers.
Petra Videmšek
Dr Petra Videmšek is assistant professor. Her main research interests are social inclusion in mental health and disability, promoting the involvement of service users in research and education, advocacy for people with mental health and learning disabilities who experience sexual abuse, and developing supervision in social work. She is the author of the first Slovene easy reading handbook (1999) about Good and Bad Touches for people with disabilities. Petra leads the training programme Qualification for Supervisors in social care at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Work.