Chronic staff shortages and high rates of turnover in child protection programs create opportunities for social work mobility across the world. Australian child protection departments actively recruit social workers from the United Kingdom and Ireland. This strategy may cause tension relating to the application of known western social work practice and theory and limited understanding of Australian First Nations worldviews. Australia continues to struggle with the ongoing impact of colonisation, First Nations children are overrepresented in child protection service delivery. This paper explores the understanding held by overseas-born and educated social workers of Australian First Nations peoples, when they migrate to practice in frontline child protection. Interviews with 13 practitioners across two-time points explored social work practice in the transnational context. This paper identifies that there is a need to raise transnational social workers' awareness of Australian First Nations child rearing practices that may lie outside their experiential understanding.• Transnational social workers have little understanding of First Nations peoples and their perspectives.• This limited understanding may also impact transnational social workers' rapport with First Nations Australians because their personal lived experiences may greatly differ from the Australian First Nations lifeworld.
Unprecedented trends of complex humanitarian contexts are unfolding globally, and they are driven by numerous humanitarian crisis drivers. Two of the more recent and ongoing crisis drivers are the Coronavirus Pandemic 2019 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. While the pandemic has already caused a direct impact on unprepared health systems and caused secondary havoc on already fragile countries, the BLM movement has exposed the deeply held structural inequalities experienced by populations who do not identify as Western European. Both crisis drivers have also exposed the structural problems that have long underpinned humanitarian responses. To prepare for these complexities in humanitarian contexts, social work educators need to respond to the loud outcry for holistically educated and critically reflective social work practitioners. We argue this can be achieved through an Intercultural Social Work Curriculum informed by First Nations world views to enable a shift in student mindset from Western thought, setting the foundations for professional intercultural practice in complex humanitarian contexts.
The inclusion of First Nations health curricula in programs is critical for the development of culturally safe graduates, however, less is known about how to embed content into curriculum in ways that reflect best practice and pedagogy. The aim of this scoping review was to describe methods and processes of First Nations health curriculum development in nursing, medical, dentistry, and allied health entry-level programs in international peer-reviewed journals. Systematic searches of databases were completed including CINAHL, Proquest, Medline, and Informit; with additional searches in Google Scholar and First Nations-led journals. A total of 104 articles met inclusion criteria; the majority relating to medicine ( n = 38) and nursing/midwifery ( n = 17) student cohorts. Methods and processes for embedding First Nations health content are described, including First Nations-led development and co-leadership, resulting in a suggested model for curriculum development. Evidence-informed curriculum development is critical to ensure effective methods and processes are adopted and cultural safety learning outcomes are achieved.
Assumptions and worldviews shape social work research, particularly when influenced by settler colonialism in contemporary Australia. This article explores experiences from graduate research drawing on Ruch’s model of reflective learning and Fook and Gardner’s action-orientated approach to critical reflection. Written following PhD completion, it investigates significant learnings by reviewing reflective journal entries, feedback on draft manuscripts and supervision notes that were made during the time of the study. Deconstructing and reconstructing assumptions across all phases of graduate research show the trajectory from experienced social worker to novice researcher and the context within which this learning takes place. This process foregrounds graduate research influenced by Australia’s demographic, historical and political context in which the impact of colonisation continues to reverberate. Critical interrogation is required for socially just change. Currently, there remains a risk that graduate research produces knowledge that is founded on and shared through white perspectives, maintaining the status quo. Critical reflective learning needs a stimulating and safe learning environment that encourages hidden assumptions to surface and be openly questioned. This study concludes that personal and professional biases unconsciously influence graduate research and need to be identified in a constructive and supportive learning environment.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.