Shifting subordination : Co-located interprofessional collaboration between teachers and social workers

The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyse the practice processes involved in co-located interprofessional collaboration. The study took place in a resource school where social workers and teachers collaborate on an everyday basis around children who are both in receipt of special educational support and interventions from social services. The research question centres on the division of labour and the explicit notions and implicit assumptions that underpin it. Further, the organisational conditions that influence the division of labour, the process involved in the selection of pupils, and the processes of maintenance and development of professional identities in a close collaborative context are all examined. The study is a qualitative case study of interprofessional collaboration. Through interviews with the teachers and social workers, and via participatory observation of their professional practice, empirical data has been generated. This has been used to examine processes of collaborative collaboration in accordance with a thematic analytical scheme. A theoretical framework based on theories of the sociology of professions (Abbot, 1988; Evetts, 2006b) and drawing also on the work of Hasenfeld (2010a) on human service organisations and Lipsky (1980) on street level bureaucrats, in conjunction with Strauss’ (1978) theory of negotiations, has been used in analysing the empirical data. The results indicate that the intake process functions primarily to legitimise collaboration from an organisational and professional perspective. Further, the teachers and social workers create what are termed common and separate grounds for practice. The concept of common grounds describes the processes in which common collaborative relationships are created, such as, for example, the construction of interchangeability and a common practice ideology. Separate grounds, on the other hand, involves situations in which social workers and teachers are engaged in defining and specifying their profession-specific roles in the context of their everyday work. Another means of maintaining and reinforcing a profession-specific professional identity in co-located collaborative contexts is the use of the spatial design. The results also point to three particular characteristics in the construction of co-located interprofessional collaboration. First, professionals are engaged in what can be termed a form of shifting subordination as a means of both legitimising and developing their professional identities. Shifting subordination is a strategy used to reduce and avoid professional conflict around roles and working tasks. Secondly, they are engaged in constructing a shared professional identity as a means to meet the organization’s imperative of ‘getting the job done’. Thirdly, there is the characteristic of interdependence which shapes the negotiation processes involved in the division of labour

Learning ‘at work’ during social work education:

The aim of this article is to describe and analyse the learning processes of Swedish social work students during and after periods of workplace-based learning. The article describes the process in which the practice learning opportunities that the students have been involved in are reflected upon, discussed, problematised and theorised, both in a series of workshops and via the process of the narrative description of critical incidents. Practice learning opportunities form an integral part of studies of social work in the Social Pedagogy program at the University West in Sweden, where a reflective approach to both campus and practice learning has been developed. In presenting the analysis of the reflective approach to studies of social work the article draws on both Scandinavian and international research and presents Säljö’s theory of situated learning and Nielsen & Kvale’s theory of Mesterlaerer in the analysis of the critical incident narratives of two individual social work students

To make ends meet : Children´s perspective on parental unemployment

This report is about the ways in which children in families with previous economic stability experience and adapt to substantially decreased household income as a consequence of a parent's/parents' unemployment. While much is known about children growing up in poor families, and how they understand and act in relation to the family's economic situation, little is known about children who suddenly find themselves living in economic adversity. In the context of post-financial crisis Sweden where in the late 2000s/early 2010s large numbers of families with previously stable incomes found themselves in economic adversity, the objective of the research is to investigate how children and young people experience substantial decreases in household income as a consequence of parental unemployment. In particular focus is directed to the ways in which they reason about and respond to the family's new economic circumstances. Interviews with children (N=45) whose parents had previously been in long-term employment but lost their jobs were carried out. Drawing on national data provided by the National Transition Fund for Blue-collar Workers (TSL) and (ii) the Local Transition fund for white-collar staff in the private sector (TRS), five municipalities in the west of Sweden with the highest numbers of transition grants were initially identified for recruitment of families subjected to unemployment during the years of 2010-2013.The interview data was analysed using thematic content analysis (Broun & Clark2006) with focus directed to children's agency (Kuczinski 2003). While the results are largely in line with previous research on children living in long-termpoor families, that is to say that parents put children´s needs first, children take responsibility for the family situation by not financial demands on the parentsone major difference emerged. None of the types of self-excluding behavior characteristic of avoidance-oriented strategies was found. Unlike children living in poverty where self-exclusion and the avoidance of exposure to stigmatizing situations where resource disparities are highlighted are common, the children in the current study did not regard parental unemployment and the family's loss of income as a source of shame. Rather, they expressed awareness of how macroeconomic forces had impacted on their lives and, as active agents, developedstrategies that enabled them to adjust to the family's new economic reality. The implications of this result indicate that social workers working with children insuch situations need to reconsider interpretations of behavior that are rooted inthe assumption that economic adversity generates shame and stigma

Organizing for agency: rethinking the conditions for children’s participation in service provision

In the organization of child care services, constraints restrict the potential for children’s participation in the formation and delivery of support programmes. These constraints involve the prioritization of risk management, poor understandings of what participation entails, and entrenched socio-cultural perspectives of children as vulnerable and requiring protection. However, when children’s participation is recognized as an imperative, both morally and as a means of enhancing service efficiency, and when organizational visions and practice ideologies uphold the importance of children’s involvement in decision-making, spaces for children’s agency can become part of everyday practice routines. Drawing on three examples of organizational innovations in child-directed social work, this article explores the benefits involved in “organizing for children’s agency”

Stories in social work:

Summary: Practice learning opportunities form an integral part of studies of social work on the Social Pedagogy program at University West in Sweden and, over a period spanning several years, we have developed a reflective approach to both campus and practice learning. Over the last four years we have worked with a narrative approach to the creation of knowledge from practice learning and for examining the learning outcomes that derive from this educational process. The aim of this article is to describe and discuss the narrative approach to the creation of knowledge using the so-called ‘storytelling method’ as an educational resource for eliciting evidence of learning outcomes in practice learning. We have used this approach to capture the learning that takes place when students are on learning opportunity placements in the social work/social pedagogical field, both nationally and internationally. The article describes both the educational context where storytelling takes place, and the research focus on work integrated learning that led to the implementation of this pedagogical tool. We will also describe and analyse how we use the ‘storytelling method’ with a focus on how it can be used to ‘evidence’ students’ learning

Language in a business context

Sammanfattning Arbetet syftar till att belysa (1) ämnesspråkliga svårigheter vid undervisning i företagsekonomi på gymnasieskolan samt (2) vilka multimodala arbetssätt som används och hur dessa i så fall främjar förståelsen för budgetbegreppen. Undersökningen utgör en kvalitativ studie där semistrukturerade intervjuer har genomförts med fyra lärare i företagsekonomi på fyra olika skolor. Arbetet har utgått ifrån de två frågeställningarna samt baserats på de didaktiska frågorna vem, vad, hur och varför, som återfinns i den didaktiska triangeln. Vi har undersökt vilka kopplingar till Deweys kontinuitetsprincip och Vygotskijs sociokulturella perspektiv som kan identifieras samt använts Cummins fyrfältsmodell för analys i syfte att kunna besvara studien frågeställningar.    De viktigaste slutsatserna som vi dragit av studien är följande: Förförståelse från eleverna när det gäller begrepp och modeller kring budget är begränsad till vardagsfrågor och eleverna saknar helt kunskap kring det företagsekonomiska ämnesspråket när de påbörjar sin gymnasieutbildning. Eleverna har idag sämre ordförråd när det gäller det svenska språket, vilket bidrar till försvårande omständigheter för ekonomilärarna, och det blir mer utmanande för lärarna att skapa en fördjupad kunskap för företagsekonomiska begrepp hos eleverna. Lärarna använder sig genomgående av multimodala arbetssätt för att nå eleverna genom olika sinnen och vikten av varierade lektioner framhålles. Genom användandet av olika multimodala verktyg baserat på elevens utvecklingsstadier enligt Cummins fyrfältsmodell, främjas inlärningen

Language in a business context

Sammanfattning Arbetet syftar till att belysa (1) ämnesspråkliga svårigheter vid undervisning i företagsekonomi på gymnasieskolan samt (2) vilka multimodala arbetssätt som används och hur dessa i så fall främjar förståelsen för budgetbegreppen. Undersökningen utgör en kvalitativ studie där semistrukturerade intervjuer har genomförts med fyra lärare i företagsekonomi på fyra olika skolor. Arbetet har utgått ifrån de två frågeställningarna samt baserats på de didaktiska frågorna vem, vad, hur och varför, som återfinns i den didaktiska triangeln. Vi har undersökt vilka kopplingar till Deweys kontinuitetsprincip och Vygotskijs sociokulturella perspektiv som kan identifieras samt använts Cummins fyrfältsmodell för analys i syfte att kunna besvara studien frågeställningar.    De viktigaste slutsatserna som vi dragit av studien är följande: Förförståelse från eleverna när det gäller begrepp och modeller kring budget är begränsad till vardagsfrågor och eleverna saknar helt kunskap kring det företagsekonomiska ämnesspråket när de påbörjar sin gymnasieutbildning. Eleverna har idag sämre ordförråd när det gäller det svenska språket, vilket bidrar till försvårande omständigheter för ekonomilärarna, och det blir mer utmanande för lärarna att skapa en fördjupad kunskap för företagsekonomiska begrepp hos eleverna. Lärarna använder sig genomgående av multimodala arbetssätt för att nå eleverna genom olika sinnen och vikten av varierade lektioner framhålles. Genom användandet av olika multimodala verktyg baserat på elevens utvecklingsstadier enligt Cummins fyrfältsmodell, främjas inlärningen

Surrounded by Support : The experiences of children and youth of interprofessional collaboration in social services

The concept of children's agency can be used to understand how children actively shape their lives. While in social work there is a growing body of research on how children experience meetings that involve collaborating professionals, little is known about the ways in which they exert an influence and the strategies they use. The purpose of the study was, in a Swedish context, to explore children's perceptions of their agentic capacity to influence who works with them when many different professionals are involved in providing support. Secondly, the aim was to investigate the perceptions of their agentic capacity in regulating their participation and exerting an influence on outcomes in interprofessional collaborative meetings. Interviews were carried out with 28 children in receipt of social services support. The results revealed that, for the older children, perceptions of the exercise of agency involved both the exclusion of certain professionals from the collaborating group as well as the identification of those perceived asbeing able to help. Additionally, the children's agency could be seen to be implicated in their perceptions of actively making decisions to acquiesce in collaborative solutions. For the younger children agency was revealed in the way that they interpreted the situations involving collaborating professionals, recognizing that it is primarily parents who decide about contact with different 'helpers". Findings with regards to the second aim revealed that children perceive professionals' talk as restricting opportunities for input. They also perceive they have capacity to exercise agency by (i) conforming to expectations by pretending to be bored and disengaged, butat the same time paying close attention to what is going on, alert to important details concerning them, (ii) by using exit strategies, and (iii) by developing 'in-situ' strategies to end meetings believed to be of little value. Rather than, as previously suggested, being powerless in such circumstances, the children talk of how they carefully assess situations, and, from a position of apparent subordination, talk of ways of acting that reveal their agentic capacity. These insights are of importance for practitioners, who are encouraged to look beyond behaviours that first meet the eye.This research has been funded by the Swedish Children's Welfare Foundation Sweden (Stiftelsen Allmänna Barnhuset

Team Agera : Ett utökat och fördjupat barn- och elevhälsoarbete genom tvärprofessionell samverkan

Ett utökat barn- och elevhälsoarbet