Teaching social work students to speak up

Abstract

It takes courage to defend your values or boundaries in the face of emotional and social risks. Social work advocacy, relationships, resilience and education all rely on the ability to engage in ‘difficult conversations’, defined as dialogue to defend personal values or boundaries in the face of potential social or emotional risks. Yet, students often speak of feeling scared, unskilled and prone to instinctive response patterns when trying to speak up, making the question of how we can teach moral courage an important and understudied area of pedagogical research. In this article, we describe a Canadian pilot study to develop and evaluate learning activities developed for an undergraduate social work practicum seminar course to help students to speak up. We describe the key elements of the learning activities co-developed with students, and outline the SPEAKER model which resulted from the study as a way of helping students to assess, safely engage in and experience success with, these difficult conversations. Drawing on the concepts of embodied learning, the pedagogy of discomfort and identity theory, we suggest the value of building learning around the naturally occurring ‘difficult conversations’ faced by students in their practicum and other areas of their life.