Dust around My Heart. Teaching Child Protection from Lived Experience: An Autoethnographic Analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACTSocial work educators face the task of integrating personal experiences into their teaching practice. In difficult topic areas such as child protection, violence, trauma, and abuse, the challenge of presenting material objectively is made more difficult when the social work educator has lived experience of these topics. This paper uses a critically creative autoethnographic methodology to examine the nexus between the author’s lived experience of the child protection system as a foster parent and teaching child protection in an undergraduate social work course. Creative writing techniques are employed to express the grief associated with foster child loss, to engage the author in a reflexive process. Implications for social work educators, and teaching from lived experience, are considered.