This paper focuses on the development of mutually beneficial relationships between refugees and students. A deficit model constructs refugees as a burden on the host community rather than an asset. Services provided to refugee communities often reflect this view and ignore the substantial resources within them. A case study of work between students and refugees which builds on the strengths of refugee communities demonstrated significant gains for both students and refugees. Key theoretical concepts in exploring this approach are those of risk, status and continuity.
Between 2001 and 2003, 14 assessed placements were provided for social work students through students creating a 'virtual' agency offering a service to refugees and asylum seekers. Drawing on research in progress regarding a unique project in South West England, this paper explores an inclusive model that creates a context for students to integrate theory and practice at the cutting edge of professional practice.The START project is a service to refugees and asylum seekers, a group that experience acute social exclusion and media-induced hostility, provided for two years entirely by students as part of their professional course requirements. Holistic, needs-led assessment, cultural sensitivity and advocacy by students allow families and unaccompanied minors to access otherwise inaccessible resources.In the current context of changing arrangements for practice assessment, emphasis on multi-disciplinary learning and service user involvement, this offers an alternative to the 'apprenticeship' model for students in developing a secure professional identity. Student learning is framed as contribution rather than burden in the organisational and employment arena and service-user outcomes have been dramatic. The focus of this paper is on the educational impact from the perspectives of students and practice teachers and an alternative model of practice learning.
A counterbalance to evidence-based approaches in public services and professions such as social work is the assertion that professional expertise is more about process than outcome. Postmodern frameworks have prompted practitioners to challenge any notion of objective truth that excludes contradiction, paradox and subjectivity. Rather, workers should seek to engage with service users in a process of negotiating meaning through intersubjectivity and attention to individual experience. Informed by research with women marginalized by mental ill-health, this article examines feminist perspectives of narrative and validating experience in the construction of self. Helping women to `re-story' their lives requires reflexivity by workers, and sensitivity to the management of power in the relationship. Creative autobiography offers a process that enables women to negotiate conflicts between subjective experience and that which is socially constructed. We argue that the challenge for reflexive professional practice is a similar struggle for reconciliation between professional and personal identity.
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