Fostering awareness of self in the education of social work students by means of critical reflectivity

Collaborative autoethnography and social work

“…Like others before me (White, 2003) I felt an immediate sense of connection when I realised that writing with often 'searing subjectivity' had the potential to offer much to both me and to others, both personally and professionally, and that autoethnography is a valid, if not always a fully accepted and conventional research method. In some respects, such an approach should not have come as such a big surprise -after all, social workers are educated to write both reflectively and reflexively (Ferreira and Ferreira 2019), but in their contexts with little or no formal acknowledgement of the parallels to basic autoethnographic practice and research. Thus, drawing explicitly on my lived experiences as a parent-carer of a daughter with a severe learning disability (Gant, 2017b), wanting to share these and make links with others in similar circumstances proved both cathartic and informative.…”