(De)construction of teaching and learning in social work education

Abstract

This study centred on social work educators' and students' constructions of classroom teaching and learning. This investigation was undertaken because of a perceived neglect in the profession of its own educational mission and theoretical limitations on previous undertakings. Previous conceptualizations of classroom teaching and learning have been premised on structuralist assumptions and have been dominated by the impulse to unify educational practice. Conventional approaches to classroom practice have continued to place emphasis upon expertise, homogeneity, instrumentalism, linearity and rationalism. Generations of social work pedagogues, both radical and conservative alike, have embraced these elements because they appear to offer a firm foundation for educational practice. Education for social work practice has been reconceptualised as involving nothing less than the critical retheorising of teaching and learning. It has been argued that there is no firm foundation for social work education, and that one is unlikely to emerge. The study used George Kelly's (1955a, 1955b, 1963a) theory of personal constructs and his repertory grid to show how classroom teaching and learning in social work education have been constructed, both on an individual and a collective basis. In a subsequent move, teaching and learning were deconstructed using a particular set of analytical strategies developed by Jacques Derrida (1976, 1981b), namely: reversal and displacement. The study has provided a preliminary set of practices which could be used in a posfstructuralist pedagogy. A total of eight educators (six men and two women) and ten students (nine women and one man) in the graduate degree program offered by the Department of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Queensland (Australia) took part in the study. The participants provided information relating to personal and academic background and the ways in which they construed classroom practices. Teaching and Learning Grids were elicited from, fed back to, and interpreted by, each participant. These grids were subjected to principal component analysis (Slater, 1977), and were used to reveal differences and similarities in and between the educators' and students' personal constructions of teaching and learning. The students were also engaged in the process of reviewing their constructions over the duration of the course (from the beginning of the 1990 academic year to the end of the 1991 academic year). Consequent changes and continuities in students' individual constructions of teaching and learning were carefully monitored and thoroughly discussed as they moved through social work education. All of the Teaching and Learning Grids produced by the study participants were further analysed using SOCIOGRIDS (Thomas, McKnight, Shaw, 1976; Shaw, 1980). The resultant Social Work Education Grid made it possible to take account of the social construction of teaching and learning.