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This paper reports on a participatory action research project with students and staff in the School of Social Work at Curtin University. We inquire into the quality of the course experience for these key stakeholders in educating for practice. While many uncontested improvements in the nature of the course have been readily achieved through this research, unresolved tensions have also come to the fore. Many of these play out the contradictions between quality management as a centrally controlled and standardised accountability process and as a locally focused idiographic improvement process. Drawing on the transcriptions of a series of focus groups held with students and staff on what quality means in the context of their course, the paper details some of the issues constraining the institutionally endorsed project of researching teaching for improvement. We explore issues such as how a perceived climate of rapid and radical change, externally imposed, cuts across the relationships required for an engaged and collaborative reflection on the quality of the course experience. Paradoxically it appears that engagement in researching quality engenders a caution and ambivalence among stakeholders about the value of open inquiry that is at odds both with the aims of the project and the values of scholarship. As prime researchers we reflect on what this means for us as academics in the practice discipline of social work. Working the social requires of each practitioner the ongoing ability to research for action. How do we educate our students for the contextual, political and personal complexities involved in this task?
In 1994 at the monthly School of Social Work Meeting at Curtin University, staff discussed the results of the Course Experience Questionnaire circulated to us by central administration. The test had been completed by the School's first year students in 1993 and their results were given alongside those for Curtin as a whole (Ramsden, 1991). We pondered the ambivalent, even contradictory readings to be made of them. Then the Head of School moved the meeting on by asking for volunteers to look further at this issue. So the present authors came to be involved in a research project to look with students and staff at the meanings to be made of the course experience and the implications these have in our personal and collective strivings for quality improvement.
The project is now in its second year of a six year longitudinal study exploring a cohort of students' ongoing evaluation of the quality of this Bachelor of Social Work course. It started with sixteen first year volunteers, engaging students in focused reflective dialogue on the quality of the course experience. Previous papers reporting on interim outcomes have detailed students' framing and understanding of their first year course experience, some of the potentials and problematics in staff response to these and the connections students make between the university-based first eighteen months of the course and their experiences on first practicum (Crawford & Leitmann, 1995; Leitmann & Crawford, 1995a, Leitmann & Crawford, 1995b).
This paper details our researcher reflections on a process that sees us working between our diverse but connected roles as practitioners, educators, researchers, colleagues and employees. Additionally we are both women and mothers. Laying out the tensions and translations operating between these various domains of concern and identity, we hope to unpack the knowledge we have gained from involvement in this exercise and the ways in which the varying nature of relationships connected to our key roles has shaped that knowledge.
Participating in this project has changed the way we teach, changed the way we relate to colleagues and students and engendered anxieties about never coming to closure even while we are excited about the rich vein of possibilities opening up. Are the risks involved in processing the project with all the key stakeholders worth the possible outcomes? Will we be able to permanently fix and reproduce positive outcomes or will they be the transient constructions of a particular set of players? It seems to us the unsettling discourses and mobilisations we have entered with our locally grounded aim of improving course quality are reflective of wider patternings of power in the intricate dynamics of higher education.
In the next section of this paper, we look at the relationships and knowledges coming to the fore around each of seven named facets of our identity. Foucault (1980) in his analysis of the power-knowledge relationship speaks of the privileging of a unitary body of theory and an arbitrary idea of what constitutes a science that has subjugated local, popular and indigenous knowledges located at the margins of society. In this project we have quite consciously not claimed the perspective of the privileged researcher able to colonise and interpret the experiences of all those we could label research subjects (Hartman, 1993). Instead we want to attend to the multiple and diverse relationships we have with those we see as key stakeholders.
The sentiment at that meeting was in accord with Moses (1995, 12): 'Assessment of institutions works like assessment of students - it drives the activities, whether this is ultimately productive or not.' Volunteering to explore further the results obtained, we were conscious of the centralised demand that quality be a priority across higher education(Lindsay, 1994).
While the primary concern of administration in undertaking the CEQ may have been for the scrutiny of external power holders, the provision of data to our School was an opportunity to research from a locally controlled quality improvement perspective. In this we positioned ourselves consciously by the social work maxim of starting 'where the client is at'. We wanted to actively listen to what students had to say about their course experience and we were prepared to use all our practitioner skills to this end.
The process produced four free-flowing, wide-ranging and energetic focus groups taped and transcribed. We encouraged students to describe their divergent views on what they valued in their course and what they wanted changed. We worked to keep the meaning making ongoing, ambivalent and away from binary logic.
The results are also testimony to the wonder many expressed at finding themselves at university. All had arrived at Curtin with a complex baggage of lived experience they struggled to order and understand. They had no fixed expectation of their course, being still in the process of constructing and accepting their identity as university student.
We questioned the viability of our research as we moved out from this positive experience with students to our first and so far only focus group with fellow staff. In the student groups we discussed power differentials and in our first paper disclosed that the transcript clearly caught us trying to steer the discussion away from areas that challenged our position as lecturers.
In the staff group, power differentials were not discussed but played out between us. The messages were: It was good we were creatively responding to pressures from administration to evaluate our course, it was good we provided positive feedback from students, but it was not good that we had free-ranging conversations with students about the nature of the course writ large. This was a direct assault on the value placed on academic autonomy and there was both expressed and tacit resistance to the way this project could impinge on individual academic's control over their work. Here our practitioner skills were not sufficient to guide us through the contextual, political and personal complexities involved.
How do educators course decide on what will represent the diverse actualities of social work? How do students come to reproduce the knowledge, values and actions needed to address what is represented as the actuality of practice? Perhaps most importantly in terms of achieving the purposeful change that is the vision of social work, how is transformative learning achieved for both ourselves and our students? These questions are obvious sub-texts in the interactions of fellow educators. It puts a different complexion on them when two of some fifteen staff become 'researchers' as well as educators and conduct discourse with students around such issues.
I should imagine if you went to the staff with this (list of suggested improvements) that would be a little bit threatening. I would have thought you'd rather go to staff with this (list on what students liked about the course).It was student comments like this that brought home to us the perception that both students and staff might well have, that we were in a position as designated researchers to impose our understandings on the other players. Our position as lecturer/researchers was unavoidably inscribed on the inquiry process and this led directly to a concern with what we were going to do with the information we collected. Could we be trusted? Would we assist or undermine the situation of stakeholders?
Staff did not challenge us directly on this point as students did. Instead at the staff focus group, expressed interest was muted by a tiredness at the idea of things needing to be done in response to students' suggestions for improvements. As staff our shared experience was of an organisational culture that continually and invasively demanded us to do more with less.
Kemmis (1994, 8) has captured what we think happened at this point in the project, as we tried to action our research by working with the staff. Although staff were receptive to student ideas and congratulated us on our efforts, there was a sense of being absorbed in:
A continuing process of intensification of our work which requires that we deal with more and more diverse demands in every aspect of what we do - teaching, course development,, and innovations in pedagogy; research and consultancy; professional and community service; and, overall, administration and quality assurance.Taking action for improvement seemed too difficult and distant. The resources required were beyond our present lived experience in this university. This begged the question as to whose purposes we were serving in continuing with the project and how staff could preserve maximum autonomy and say in a climate of withholding resources for those non compliant with the dictates of quality improvement.
In our collegial relations within the School of Social Work we are well aware of such truths. At the same time, we live in a culture that explicitly values utilitarian economic knowledge above all (Stretton, 1987). Framed by these market-driven values, a positivism has permeated the whole of higher education, leaving relational knowledge marginalised. In a profound shift to 'I-it' relationships in the Australian intellectual climate, economic rationalism has powerfully inscribed itself on our collegial discourse. The muted but persistent valuing of practice wisdom has been challenged anew both within and without the academy. Practice knowledge is glossed it as a technical knowledge connected to measurable practical competencies (Australian Association of Social Workers, 1994).
Kemmis reflecting on the massive effort to redescribe Australian teacher education in competency based terms concludes:
they ( DEET and AEC ) attempt to persuade teacher educators to understand the practice of teacher education from a rationalistic perspective on education - or training - as a seamless system of skills production necessary for the restructuring of the Australian economy. At the most general level, it has some plausibility, even credibility. ... (yet) It is a partial view which sees workers in terms of skills, but not in terms of intentions or in terms of social relationships (Kemmis 1994 p 7).Within our School, a similarly perceived climate of rapid and radical change, externally imposed , cuts across the collegial relationships required for an engaged and collaborative reflection on the quality of the course experience. The more imperatives for change are announced by the centre, the more staff at a local level withdraw from collective engagement. In an expression of resistance to having academic autonomy undermined, staff chose to individualistically attend to matters of quality.
Many colleagues are used to not being heard in the wider environment and choose to just get on with their task of teaching social work. They remain open to further involvement in the project, time and energy permitting. Individually, staff have taken particular findings pertinent to their area and used them to rework their areas of the curricula. So in field education, one of us is working with the field coordinator to rewrite the field manual and the course offered to field educators. The autonomy and creative space needed for such activity is perceived to be diminished in political settings such as School Meetings where open discourse could be threatening in unknown ways.
This relationship to the project is very different from that with the students. Students wanted to explore the multiple realities they experience, their issues of values in practice and their sense of agency in becoming social workers. They had a clear interest in working collaboratively to their own end of a heightened consciousness as to what quality education might mean. In openly sharing their ideas, they clearly perceived little unmanageable risk around issues of trust and politics.
What we can know must always be partial, contestable, unfinished but for all that valuable. In witnessing, reporting and theorising this research experience, we are arguing for a straddling of the present bifurcations between theory and practice, text and talk (Smith, 1990)
As researchers we shared with many of the participants the complex task of juggling the demands of mothering and employment outside the home. These ontological factors in our nature as knowers clearly shaped what emerged in the discussion. The words most often used by students to describe themselves in field practice were positively, excited, confident, valued and privileged and more negatively, relieved, anxious, stressed and mother guilt. When we look at what they said to flesh out the positive words, it is clear how profoundly their identity as social workers is shaped by their identity as women and mothers. So:
I know I personally grew a lot in confidence in my placement. I was in an office where I had to be quite assertive and that then impacted on my family. I know my husband thought "My God". He said: "You didn't use to say what you think so much". And it was true, I mean just to keep the peace I just used to get on with things, where as now I am more inclined to say " This isn't fair and I won't do it" ... You know it has just completely altered the dynamics within our family and will probably forever. It's not that my views on life have altered greatly but as I have grown in confidence I feel more able to express them and to stand up.Another student expressed her growth in confidence in her placement when:
the office staff would find themselves in a situation and come to me versus somebody else to speak to a client. And I did also feel very privileged and valued through that experience.On the gendered nature of social work:
This great emphasis placed on how we feel valued ( in our working role ) is probably a reflection of how undervalued we are as mothers and women.
there is a culture in the office that says: "You're here now, you conform to what everybody is doing. Never mind what you've been taught.... these are your cases this is how we want you to handle them". They were given the story of what the client is all about and not to make their own judgements. 'When this client comes in they always want this. Well you just tell them no and that's it'At this point another student volunteered an alternate viewpoint:
Remember you do have the opportunity to act differently. I mean that's another thing we've been taught, I mean you can disagree, you can argue, you can put an alternate case.In this dialogue we could hear the students grappling with their own sense of agency. They were articulating the ways in which differing understandings of caring inscribe themselves in the everyday practice of social work and how important it is for each intending practitioner to consciously position themselves in terms of resisting, supporting, straddling, or challenging this dominant culture. One student summed up this experience when she observed that the act of confronting inflexible services and rigid policies "teaches you to be creative as well as subversive".
The second struggle refers to their own encounter with the practice requirement that they critically draw on and bring together differing ways of knowing (Hartman, 1990). How in practice do they purposefully shift between technical/objective, interpretive, and critical/transformative reasonings according to their reading of the context (Kemmis, 1994).
Several stories were told during the session around student engagement with this task. These stories from practice spoke clearly of the "complex, ambiguous, intersubjective, interpretive and political nature of social work practice" (Gorman, 1993 p.260).
In coming to a theoretical framing of their grounded accounts of knocking against the culture of economic rationalism and of creatively drawing on differing ways of knowing, we were struck by a connectedness between their experiences and ours as educators. Reflecting on our everyday actions in conducting this research project, we could identify a similar patterning in our own stories of practice.
Students reported feeling they had been cast into a world radically changed from the world from which our teaching knowledge was derived. This is true in a sense , but the radical changes they spoke of were and are happening within as well as without the academy. The image of ivory towers disconnected from the wider world no longer resonate with our experience of academia. If we can name our lived experiences and tune into to acting in our world - the world of the academy - we may be better equipped to work with the students as they struggle to give meaning and express agency in theirs.
As educators how do we critically draw on and bring together differing ways of knowing in our practice of teaching. Such abilities have little base for development in an academic culture that values text over talk, theory over practice, standardised knowledge over local grounded knowledge and disciplinary boundaries over collaborative connections.
The university tradition is built on the taken-for-granted assumption that expertise relates to discrete fields of study. We carve up the curriculum between staff, and tend to present students with packages of knowledge. We leave students with the often unvoiced task of connecting and integrating these as practitioners. There is little valorisation of an ability to cross, merge and transcend our claimed knowledge territories. This reflects a valuing of learning about not learning in and for practice.
In the focus group after first placement students named experiences of the course where we demonstrated the practice requirement to merge and move between the differing ways of knowing. Those aspects of the curriculum that valued the articulation of knowing from multiple perspectives - with all its uncertainty, complexity, conflict, non-generalisability and paradox were named as most helpful in their navigating the landscapes of practice. The students felt well equipped to work with diversity and differing understandings. In the first focused group held at the end of the first year of their course, these same students had expressed a frustration with not being told or directed to the 'right' answer. Experiencing the shades of grey were explained by the students as being either their failure to understand or the lecturers' failure to adequately teach. In session three, rather than being intimidated by these shades of grey, students saw this as a demonstration of their knowing rather than their not knowing. "As we come to know our many selves we are equipped to join with the many selves of our clients" (Imre, 1984, p44).
At one level the students had expressed criticism of the idealised way in which aspects of the curriculum were framed, yet at another level they also voiced a need to be presented with the ideal as well as the hard edged 'reality'. Although the idealised may serve to protect ourselves and the students from the graphic actualities of practice, it also provides a benchmark by which we can direct and shape our practice. Having a representation of an ideal often gave the students the strength to work in very difficult, painful and disheartening situations. It provided students with an image of possibilities to be strived for.
As social work educators we are left with the challenge of reflecting in our own practice on ways that we can resist becoming part of the ongoing bifurcation between knowing and doing, theory and practice, text and talk and public policy and personal stories. The experience has made clear the compelling attraction of disengaged, objective forms of research that enable data to be gathered without the commitment to reciprocal relationships. At the same time it has made clear that the messiness of contextual, political and personal complexities is precisely what we must prepare student social workers to make meaning of in practice.
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| Authors: Fran Crawford and Sabina Leitmann School of Social Work, Curtin University of Technology Email: crawford@spectrum.curtin.edu.au, leitmann@spectrum.curtin.edu.au Tel: (09) 351 7030 Fax: (09) 351 3192 Please cite as: Crawford, F. and Leitmann, S. (1996). 'Everthing's got a moral if only you can find it': Lessons from researching course quality. Different Approaches: Theory and Practice in Higher Education. Proceedings HERDSA Conference 1996. Perth, Western Australia, 8-12 July. http://www.herdsa.org.au/confs/1996/crawford.html |