USING CRITICAL REFLECTION TO DEVELOP POVERTY-AWARE PROFESSIONALS

Aims: to address the need for better poverty-awareness in social workers and teachers. It focuses on what is a problem for many socially-oriented professions: the conceptual gap between analysis and practice. In the case of poverty the gap is between societal levels of analysis and: 1. understandings of the personal experiences of poverty and 2. Resultant strategies applied at individual levels in teaching and social work practice. The project will develop pilot projects (using critical reflection) to uncover professionals’ hidden assumptions about people in poverty, and to help them devise changed practice strategies.
Methods: The project takes an interdisciplinary approach (social work, teaching, higher education, sociology and social policy) to investigating the details of the need for poverty awareness in teachers and social workers across several national contexts (The UK, Belgium, Israel and Australia); and combines an interdisciplinary understanding in devising a pilot curriculum and further research to address the problem.
Contribution to knowledge: It will provide details of: 1. specific assumptions practitioners make about poverty and people who experience it; 2. dynamics which support this thinking; 3. how this thinking might be uncovered and changed through a process of critical reflection; and 4. how this process might develop changed practices.