Social Work Education: Moving the Profession into the Future

This Issue brings together a mix of authors who may be somewhat unknown to readers of the Journal, as well as authors well-known to the Journal’s readership. Most special issues in Australian Social Work emerge as the result of a successful pitch to the Editorial Board as to why this might be a good idea, and eventual publication of some or all the papers submitted in response to a call for papers. This Special Issue focusing on Social Work Education has a rather different history, coming about from the Editor, Fiona McDermott, identifying that the Journal had accepted several papers about social work education, and deciding to publish these as a collection. However, the numerous papers from Australian authors about social work education in journals such as Social Work Education: The International Journal and other international journals, not only evidence the strength of scholarship, but suggest that judgements about Australian social work on the basis of this collection alone, would be unwise. It will be 30 years at the end of 2019 since I qualified as a social worker, and in that time the changes to both social work practice and the myriad of contexts in which social work practice occurs have changed immensely. So too has social work education and I too recall Donna McAuliffe’s stories of needing to take copious notes and many hours spent searching the library for resources that were not to be found (McAuliffe, 2018). One such change mentioned by Deborah Western in this Issue is the potential for social media to be utilised as a tool for social change (Western, 2018). Using social media in professional practice has, however, given rise to a range of new ethical issues, which social work educators, both in Australia and internationally, are exploring (Boddy & Dominelli, 2017). Looking forward, some of our current students may still be practising in 40 years’ time, in a world that is difficult to imagine, except that many of the problems that social workers address, such as poverty, social exclusion, violence, abuse, and chronic illness, will almost certainly still be present. Rather than learning sets of facts, which may quickly become redundant in this ever-changing world, the need for social workers to be able to critically reflect on situations and respond appropriately is critical. While several papers in this Issue discuss the need for criticality, Lynelle Watts has identified varying approaches to what is meant by reflective practice, and noted that these different understandings are all used by Australian social work educators (Watts, 2018a). Tamara Blakemore and Kylie Agllias explored critical reflection and the process of teaching self-awareness to social work students (Blakemore & Agllias, 2018), and Deborah Western to the need for students to be able to critically analyse the impact of individual characteristics such as gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and ability (Western, 2018), while Liz Beddoe has noted the need for critical reflection on the political and economic contexts in which social work is practised (Beddoe, 2018). Watts, in her response to Beddoe’s commentary proposed “the use of critical analysis as a form of struggle or agonism (Tully, 1999), whereby the very process of it is to think differently”. Watts has pointed out that this is not introspective reflection but requires engagement with others very different from ourselves (Watts, 2018b).