When it comes to family inclusion, there is a gap between policy and service delivery practice. Changes in service delivery attitudes, values and culture are necessary to meaningfully and systematically include families and service users.

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The value of learning from mental health lived experience is widely acknowledged, however, the nature of lived experience involvement in Australian social work education seldom extends beyond guest lecturing. Further, few opportunities exist that build the capacity of people with lived experience to become educators within tertiary settings. In this paper we present the Valuing Lived Experience Project (VLEP), an initiative led by a Lived Experience Academic that seeks to systematically and meaningfully embed lived experience into the social work curriculum at a Western Australian university by providing significant opportunities for the capacity building of both individuals with mental health lived experience and academics. Given the relative infancy of service user involvement in Australian social work education, the VLEP offers a number of opportunities for reflection and consideration. A longstanding partnership between a Lived Experience Academic and Social Work Academic is described, the activities and key learnings of the VLEP to date are outlined, and we offer our reflections on challenges encountered throughout the journey. We hope that our experiences and learnings can be drawn upon to progress lived experience participation in tertiary settings and further legitimise lived experience involvement in the education of social workers.

Working from a trauma informed lens is increasingly recognized as a vital component of social work practice, as is learning from and incorporating lived experience into one's approach to practice. Further, the critical and feminist informed interrogation of dominant ideas around professional power and expertise within social work practice is necessary in learning and teaching about trauma. This conceptual article describes an integrated approach to teaching fourth year Australian social work students in the area of violence, abuse, and trauma. The intentionally immersive learning and teaching framework presents and incorporates praxis as involving educator lived experience, theoretical knowledge, and practice experience. The approach aims to create transformative and embodied learning opportunities which destabilize dominant constructions of social work identities, use of professional power and different practice approaches. While honoring the valuable contributions of trauma informed practice, we seek to push students beyond this model, prompting critical feminist analysis of the socio-political complexity of trauma experiences. We describe our work, ambitions, challenges, and learnings as feminist educators, sharing these ideas in order to provoke dialogue on possibilities for pedagogical innovation, within the context of power, expertise, social work education, and lived experience.

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