Challenge, reflection and growth
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way my practice has and is being shaped and developed. Having left the employ of a local authority five years ago now, I have to work a tiny bit harder to create social work specific continuing professional development opportunities.
I am lucky enough to have done this at a time when society is embracing social media and technologies that open up diverse (and free) learning opportunities that would not have been as available at the beginning of my career.
I started blogging regularly in 2008. My goal was not defined at that time apart from wanting a space to write about social work in England from the perspective of someone ‘doing’ social work but over the years, it enabled me to open a world to continuous learning that hasn’t left me, despite stopping the writing.
Creating a space for myself which was open to comment was one of the greatest learning tools that I was able to use. After the blog, I joined Twitter, initially with the aim to use it to promote the blog. After all, who could have thought that in the micro-blogging space there would be deeper opportunities to learn and create relationships than in the ‘long form’.
Challenge
One of the earlier lessons I learnt was how ‘open’ my writing was. While I was aiming my audience towards ‘people like me’, it didn’t take long for me to realise that people who used social work services were also interested in the perspective. I was increasingly challenged – sometimes by people who had had poor experiences of social work input, sometimes by people who quite rightly, challenged my assumptions about ‘service users’ or who shared different perspectives to mine. When you create a public platform for yourself, challenge is an expectation. Sometimes the challenge came from other, often much more experienced social workers than myself. Sometimes from those starting down the path.
I took the view early that challenge was not to be shirked or ignored. I had a strict rule (which I dropped later) that I wanted to be authentic so would publish every comment, including and especially critical ones because I wanted readers to see what was being said and judge both the comments and my responses in the context in which they were provided. The rule was dropped when my blog came to the attention of a group of people who had specific reasons to be angry with anyone who identified as social workers. I started to engage but realised as the abuse grew, that any attempt to engagement drew greater frustrations and when comments started to libel third parties/name the social workers they were unhappy with, I had to hold them and not publish. But disagreement was never an issue, nor was dislike or anger.
Being and practising as a social worker gave me skills to approach challenge as a gift to either explain further where there had been a genuine misunderstanding or allowed me to view things from a different perspective.
Learning from different perspectives
For me, this is probably the greatest area of learning for me and continues to be. Although I’ve closed my blog and most of my social media interactions in the social work sphere are either on Twitter or Facebook.
We can and should constantly ask for feedback from people who use the services we help to provide (or, increasingly aren’t able to provide services for). This, though, doesn’t account from the ever-present power dynamics.
When I took my social work course, and my ASW course after that – we had to get feedback from people we had worked with. I remember going back to people who I had assessed and applied to detain under the Mental Health Act, usually a few weeks later and asking them about how they felt I had been. I got nice, positive feedback for the most part but they knew I had power which had been exerted over them so – while I thought I was as nice as I could possibly be – I’m not sure how honest the feedback was or how able they would have felt to criticise me.
This, for me is the value of interactions and learning on social media. By further interactions with people who have been subject to social work interventions or denied social work interventions when they have needed them, I have been able to work with far more honest criticism and challenge myself to change my practice. I’m more aware of language which is ‘wrong’ or oppressive which I might not have noticed previously – for example, the term ‘empowerment’ or criticisms of the ‘recovery model’ which is so loved in mental health circles. It has led me to read much more about co-production and not assume because the term appears in flashy Trust literature that it is happening. It has taught me to be deeply sceptical of some of the systems that I assumed worked, like organisational complaints policies and has made me challenge organisations I work in and with about their own accessibility.
Sometimes, and more often than not, I’ve been wrong and apologised. Sometimes I have created misunderstandings or become angry or upset but it is only through these experiences, these interactions that I genuinely believe I have been able to improve my practice and my knowledge.
Growing
I worked in one local authority/mental health trust for around 10 years. I worked in what I thought was a good team, with a great, supportive manager and really skilful and knowledgeable practitioners. But by moving out and learning about different services in other areas as well as critically reflecting on my own practice and assumptions, I was able to have other places or experiences to compare my experience of practice to. This didn’t only happen by moving out though, it happened because I started to let other voices in when I was on random online forays.
In many of the professions within health and social care, we want to believe we are helping and ‘doing the right thing’. Being able to go home at night thinking, ‘I made a difference’ is a great driver. If we didn’t feel it, we shouldn’t be doing it. This isn’t a bad thing. This is exactly the motivation that can push us to improve. We shouldn’t need flashy sponsored “change days/weeks/months” which push corporate values and demand we “pledge” with hashtags and publicity machines as seems to be creeping into the NHS. Our motivation to improve should be driven by reflection on both the small steps we can take as individuals in every interaction and the reflection and challenges on systems which can oppress or discriminate. This is where challenge to our own assumptions and comfort is necessary. Change and constant improvement doesn’t happen where we don’t and can’t accept and welcome challenge. The enemy of quality is complacency but the motivations can’t be ‘trending on twitter’ or ‘numbers of followers’, they can and should be about how our interactions in all levels, can be more valuable to those who rely on us doing a good job.
Pride and Humility
I’ve written many times about how I see humility as a core social work value. At the heart of humility is the need to understand and reflect on challenge, particularly from those dependent on the services we provide. We need to be aware of the power we have and understand how frightening challenging authority can be and do everything we can be accept it so we can improve.
Humility as a social worker doesn’t mean we can’t be proud of the work we do. We can and we should when we are able to work in a way that furthers the goals of those who are dependent on us. There is nothing wrong in feeling proud of a job well done, feeling happy when things work out or wanting to share our stories when we have been able to make a positive impact, but this needs to be in proportion. One of the reasons the ‘hero’ narrative grates with me is that it denies the contributory factors that lead to good social work practice and distill them to one person’s interventions. In order to provide good social work, we need support and supervision, we need learning cultures, we need systems which provide services which are necessary or useful and we need to be able to grow.
This work, this privilege of working in an area where you can feel like you make a difference, is precious and it is a role to be proud of. That doesn’t mean we are ‘better’ people because not all social work is good and not all social workers are effective, we need to understand nuance, respect our power and positive, accept challenge and grow from it. Then we will be on the way to achieving great things – with those who rely on us rather than for them. And isn’t that a better place to be for everyone.
