On social location and how that can inform teaching social work research for reflective practice.

Some of our FLC group discussions highlighted the importance of considering social justice as a motivator for students to engage in required research courses.  In other words, to encourage students to realize that research can promote social justice goals - either methodologically (through participation via a participatory action research design or member-checking in pure qualitative research, for example) or in terms of topics studied. 

One aspect of this conversation included the need to talk with our students about their own "social location" in relationship to the clients they see (social work, occupational therapy) or the students they teach (education).  Recognizing the hierarchies that can exist in research projects (not to mention in our own research classrooms) is a vital step in the research process - but may also be enough of a conversation parallel to students' true interest in being in school (presumably to work with people) that it may function as an engagement mechanism.  This discussion was also augmented by review of 2 papers on assessing the quality of qualitative resarch (and how researchers need to address their own biases in data analysis), click here for one exemplar article shared by one of my FLC colleagues. 

I include this graphic as an illustration of how one might think about talking about social location with one's students. 

I think that I will do this as part of an middle-of-semester reflective exercise to think about how social location may impact data collection (during the "challenges of data collection lecture) - but also to get students thinking about the gap between research and practice worlds.

Although individual pedagogical frames of reference for teaching research may differ across our faculty, we all engage in a process that Donald Shöen would refer to as reflective practice in the teaching and learning process.  Embracing the ecological framework, we encourage students to learn by engaging directly in the process of research in their concentration area (e.g. children and family services, older adults/end of life, health and mental health).  During the foundation year, in Research in Social Work, students are, for example, learning about ethnography through doing a brief community-based observation or are building research synthesis skills through the conduct of a structured literature review.  In the concentration year, while in Research Laboratory I, students delve into the nuts and bolts of research design by learning as they engage in the process of setting up all aspects of their community-based qualitative and quantitative studies.  Similarly, during Research Laboratory II, students continue to learn through the reflective process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting their data – all the context of a reflective classroom.  Throughout the course of this reflective process of learning, we ground students’ learning and experiences in the context of our profession’s debate about both the creation and use of evidence-based practice.