Professional Documents
Culture Documents
School Social Work Practice
School Social Work Practice
Submitted to: Dr Cherian P Kurien, School of Social Work, Marian College, Kuttikkanam. Submitted by: Bimal Antony, II MSW, No. 111, School of Social Work, Marian College, Kuttikkanam. Date of Submission: 7th March 2012.
Introduction
Communities matter in the lives of young people. Good schools are essentialbut even strong schools alone are not sufficient to ensure success for many young people. In tough neighborhoods, and especially in large urban areas, schools can become disconnected from other assets, isolated from community leadership and concerns, and fragmented in their approach to young peoples development. Working together, schools, families, and community organizations can reconnect schools to their communities and improve results for young people and their families.
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Group work Parent education; therapeutic groups work; personal or social skills education groups for students. Community development Provision of professional development for teachers; social action; liaison with wider community; student welfare, school curriculum and social policy analysis and development. Critical Incident Management Awareness of how people can be affected by traumatic incidents and emergencies; planning for school emergency responses; provision of counselling and support; monitoring recovery and evaluation of plans. Research Searching through literature bases for knowledge to inform practice, evaluation of research studies, evaluation of social policy, planning and implementation of research projects, and critical evaluation of the school social workers own practice. Administration Record-keeping; management; programme development and coordination; evaluation of individual practice and organisational service delivery; staff induction, training and supervision. school social work demands: the specific ability to communicate well with, and particularly to listen to children and young people in order to see their experiences within their world from their perspective; an understanding of child and youth sub-culture impacts; and the ability to advocate for the child or young person within school, family and other systems that are adult dominant; practice skills include: interpersonal and communication skills in child and adult settings; skills in reflective and critical thinking and analysis; data collection and management; negotiation and mediation. Consultation with principals, teachers and other professional workers from community agencies is an essential school social work skill; skills in making assessments and deciding on the most appropriate intervention with which to respond to particular student situations, judgements of this kind being intrinsic to social work; skills in recognising and thinking through ethical issues, again a fundamental component of social work practice, involving commitment to the AASW Code of Ethics; and the contexts of school social work practice at local, national and international levels. Understanding in this area requires knowledge of, and the ability to critically analyse, social, political, economic, historical, cultural and ecological systems, particularly as they impact on
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school systems and individual student learning outcomes. The processes, facilitators and constraints to school change need to be understood, also the trends or evolutions of school systems. School social workers also need to be able to critically analyse the structure of society, and schools as a socializing institution, with particular attention to dimensions of power and disadvantage, and the influence of class, gender, age, intellectual and physical ability, heterosexism, race, ethnicity and cultural differences. There must be a focus on empowering and non oppressive practice.
practitioners, most notably the National Parent Teacher Association (National PTA, 1998). Epsteins framework outlines six dimensions of parent-school partnerships: Type 1 Parenting Assisting families with parenting skills and setting home conditions to support children as students, as well as assisting schools to understand families. Type 2 Communicating Conducting effective communications from school-to-home and from home-to-school about school programs and student progress. Type 3 Volunteering Organizing volunteers and audiences to support the school and students. Providing volunteer opportunities in various locations and at various times. Type 4 Learning at Home Involving families with their children on homework and other curriculum-related activities and decisions. Type 5 Decision Making Including families as participants in school decisions and developing parent leaders and representatives. Type 6 Collaborating with the Community Coordinating resources and services from the community for families, students, and the school, and providing services to the community. Cataloguing these kinds of activities is a useful step, but more work is needed to capture the variety of forms that family-school connections can take and create a common language in the field. The variety of definitions makes it difficult to compare studies and models of parent involvement to one another. They also make analysis of the findings of multiple studies a challenge. For practitioners, this lack of clarity may lead to difficulty in making judgments about what kinds of activities to implement, how to implement them, and what results to expect from them.
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A General Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress (Shaul, 2000) identified a set of common elements found in school-community connections, including: Services and activities tailored to community needs and resources, with the flexibility to change as community needs change. A value for and encouragement of parent participation and individual attention from caring adults. An understanding that support for the family is integral to improving outcomes for children and youth. Active roles for parents, students, community residents, and organizations in guiding policy and practices through such entities as advisory committees. A continuing emphasis on the importance of collaboration and communication among school and community partners.
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been on fixing students so teachers can really teach and removing barriers to learning, rather than rethinking the learning and teaching that occurs for studentsall day, in and out of school and the conditions, resources and supports that enable it (p. 9). Edwards and Warin (1999) agree that parent involvement efforts sometimes operate to enlist parents as agents of the schools to meet the schools needsin essence turning parents into assistant teachersinstead of utilizing a parents unique strengths as a childs motivator and nurturer. Generally, the most important goal for schools is increased academic achievement of students; therefore, educators tend to value family and community connections because of their potential for supporting this goal, sometimes at the expense of family or community member goals (Scribner et al., 1999). Many researchers, theorists, and practitioners in the field agree that school-centered definitions do not fully express the range of connections that can and do exist (Edwards & Warin, 1999; McWilliam, Maxwell & Sloper, 1999). A continued emphasis on school-centered connections can limit the development of the entire field and its ability to identify and forge new directions for greater impact on student outcomes. Jordan, Averett, Elder, Orozco, and Rudo (2000) define collaboration as an arrangement in which partners establish joint goals and priorities, as well as shared responsibility for success. Partnerships that do not define a common mission are rarely able to sustain the long-term collaborative relationship and sharing of resources necessary to accomplishing substantive goals. This emphasis on school-centered definitions of connections can also create a significant power imbalance in the school-family-community relationship. Schools are generally backed up by powerful and stable institutional structures that support the schools definition of the roles parents and community members should play. This institutional structure infuses power into the position of the principal and the teacher in the education of the child, while the family or community member role is not automatically infused with similar power (Hulsebosch & Logan, 1998).
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and improved use of resources. Reciprocally, families and other community entities can enhance parenting and socialization, address psychosocial problems, and strengthen the fabric of family and community life by working collaboratively with schools.
Conclusion
In general, those pushing for connection from the community side want to strengthen neighborhoods, families, and schools. For example, Schorr (1997) describes promising community-school-family initiatives from this perspective. Her analysis concludes that a synthesis is emerging that rejects addressing poverty, welfare, employment, education, child
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development, housing, and crime one at a time. It endorses the idea that the multiple and interrelated problems . . . require multiple and interrelated solutions. Warren (2005) argues that for urban school reform to be successful, it must be linked to the revitalization of the surrounding communities. He categorizes current school-community collaborations as involving (1) the service approach, which he equates with the community full service schools movement; (2) the development approach, seen as embodied in community sponsorship of new schools such as charter schools; and (3) the organizing approach involving direct efforts of community organizing groups to foster collaboration with schools.
References
1. Linda Taylor, Ph.D, Howard S. Adelman, Ph.D (2000): Connecting Schools, Families and Communities, California: ASCA. 2. Chris Barrett, Chris Downing, John Frederick, Linda Johannsen & Donna Riseley (2008): Practice Standards for School Social Workers, Canberra: Australian Association of Social Workers. 3. Linda Taylor, Ph.D, Howard S. Adelman, Ph.D (2008): Fostering School, Family, and Community Involvement, Washington: Hamilton Fish Institute on School and Community Violence. 4. Jeanne Jehl (2007): Connecting SCHOOLS, FAMILIES & COMMUNITIES, Maryland: The Annie E. Casey Foundation. 5. Catherine Jordan, Evangelina Orozco, Amy Averett (2001): Emerging Issues in School, Family, & Community Connections, Texas: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL). 6. Debbie Ellis, Kendra Hughes (2002): partnerships by design - Cultivating Effective and Meaningful School-Family-Community Partnerships, Portland: Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. 7. Robert Constable (2008): The Role of the School Social Worker, Chicago: Loyola University.
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