Teaching as Conversation: The methods adopted by an inside inquirer of social work relationship based education

This paper introduces my research inquiry which is situated in my role of teaching social work students. This teaching is taking place during a time of reform and discourse of social work education in the UK whereby a... [ view full abstract ]

This paper introduces my research inquiry which is situated in my role of teaching social work students. This teaching is taking place during a time of reform and discourse of social work education in the UK whereby a dialogue is centered on the need for social workers to develop effective relationships with service users and professionals. I am responding to this debate by inquiring into how I can teach using a relationship based approach. The relationship based approach is built on a combination of Edwards and Richards (2002) model which proposes a need for mutual empathy, empowerment and engagement within the student/teacher relationship, and the matching principle introduced by Ward (2010) suggesting the training in professional education should match or reflect the model of practice. The metaphor of “teaching as conversation” derives from McNamee (2007) who suggests the conversational aspect of teaching attends to the ways in which participants create meaning together.
The paper will then go on to explore the methods to be used in the inquiry which is positioned in a systemic approach. A systemic approach is chosen because of the connections between the relational features of the relationship based model and systemic practice, which emphasises the relational aspect of the emergence of knowledge between self-with-others. One of the approaches used to capture the naturally occurring dialogue in the teaching environment will be tape recording of teaching sessions. The method to analyse the recordings will be Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM), which provides a framework of analysis incorporating interactive patterns between emotion, for example empathy, meaning and action. The paper will discuss the usefulness of this method of analysing talk within a systemic approach, applied this particular inquiry.

Key words:
Relationship based teaching, social work, systemic practice, systemic approach, Coordinated Management of Meaning