Beyond a Sugarcoated Pill: Critical Approaches to Social Work Field Supervision

Abstract

Critical pedagogy seeks to link education to social change and often forms a basis for social work curriculum in some university courses. However, less of this emphasis is given to understanding critical supervision practice for social work students while on placement in terms of the development of a critical praxis. We believe critical approaches to supervision are an overlooked and crucial aspect to maintaining critical social work practice in current neoliberal welfare contexts. This article presents key approaches that we have found useful in constructing and realizing a critical approach to social work field supervision and ultimately, the future practice of students in their respective fields. This article contributes to an ongoing discussion and strengthened engagement in critical approaches to field supervision and supports the development of social work students as critical thinkers and practitioners.

Keywords

supervision field of practice education

Critical pedagogy seeks to link education to social change (Kajner et al., 2013; Saleeby & Scanlon, 2005) and often forms a basis for social work curriculum in some university courses. Notwithstanding this, less emphasis is apportioned to understanding critical supervision practices for social work students on field placement in preparation for the development of a critical praxis (Loos & Kostecki, 2018). Indeed, research on social work supervision in general is limited (Bogo & McKnight, 2006) and further exploration, development, application, and evaluation of models and approaches are required (Hair, 2015; O’Neill & del Mar Farina, 2018). Moreover, a neoliberal emphasis on outcome-focused direct practice work, for many agencies, is given higher priority than the educational development of new critical social work professionals (Morley & Dunston, 2013). In this article, we define critical supervision as that which “seeks to be transformative, requiring educators to challenge racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, ableism and other manifestations of oppression created by dominant power relations and structures” (Morley et al., 2017, p. 28).

Chiefly, when considering current neoliberal welfare contexts, critical approaches to supervision are often an overlooked but crucial means to providing guidance in realizing critical practice for students undertaking their field education component of the degree. This article presents key insights we have found useful in constructing and realizing a critical praxis by focusing on critical supervision practices using a dialogic research approach to privilege the oft marginalized voices of field educators and students (Loos & Kostecki, 2018).

Our research project is a collaboration developed as an illustration of conversation as a process method (van Enk, 2009) initially between the first two authors, Tina and Lisa, who then invited a student who had completed a placement, Camille, and an external field supervisor and doctoral candidate, Vaska, to join the conversation that ultimately occurred between all four authors. In this way, the conversation, as Bodén and Gunnarsson contend, becomes an assemblage, always multiple and collective, allowing us “to acknowledge the messy and hybrid processes of knowledge production” (2021, p. 1). In a similar way to Bryant and Livholts, our aim was to show how “these methodological choices bring forth the kinds of rich data that is lacking in quantitative analyses and traditional qualitative accounts” (2015, p. 117). Thus, this project was worked as an expression of a critical approach to research by resisting positivist techniques. Accordingly it is characterized by continuous exploration of assumptions, attention to relational dimensions between the authors including the operation of power, listening deeply, learning from one another, and remaining aware of how meaning is collaboratively constructed (Brown & Strega, 2015). To this end, our roles as researchers are characterized as “insiders” (Ross, 2017). We are simultaneously the “researched” and “researcher” grappling with the tensions, emotions, and contradictions of being activist-scholars-researchers (Defilippis, 2015), friends and colleagues, in the process of the collaborative conversation (Bodén & Gunnarsson, 2021, p. 5).

As qualitative researchers, we are aware of the complexities, contextual and cultural embeddedness, particularities, and challenges involved in the ethical practice of research. As such, our philosophical concern for equity and the imposition of power within the ethical conceptualization and practice of research itself, “even when we acknowledge data as ‘our own’ constructions,” leaves us questioning our privilege (or power position) (Cannella & Lincoln, 2007, p. 316). Thus, it is important to situate ourselves as researchers and researched in this study. As we are academic scholars, students and field educators concerned about the inherent power imbalance and how the ethical concerns pertaining to this imbalance are addressed, we find Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledges useful. To understand our situatedness, we have chosen the concept of reflexivity rather than reflection. Reflexivity is a process, which requires critical engagement with one’s own images of the world, marginalization and privilege, interpretation, contradictions, and ethics (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004). We agree with Pillow who argues for a reflexivity of discomfort through methodological innovation suggesting that “to be reflective does not demand an ‘other,’ while to be reflexive demands both an ‘other’ and some self-conscious awareness of the process of scrutiny” (2003, p. 177). We have used a reflexive approach to consider and question the construction of our research design, data, and reported data. For us, reflexivity is both a scrutiny of ourselves and our research, a willingness to critique our research practices, which in turn reshapes the research and, indeed, ourselves (Bryant & Livholts, 2015).

The decision to focus on critical supervision practices has been motivated by our awareness of the transformational potential seated in this relationship through, “mentoring, supporting and challenging students…while encouraging significant professional socialisation” (Maidment, 2015, p. 96). In practice, supervision practices are highly variable (Loos & Kostecki, 2018) because of mutable and university context–dependent training alongside the supervisor’s own values, assumptions, and experiences in practice. Ostensibly, relatively few resources exist for supervisors to confidently develop skills in critical social work supervision save for, in Australia, a peppering of published works (e.g., Beddoe, 2015; Hosken et al., 2016; Morley & Dunstan, 2013; Noble, 2016). In this article, we aim to build on this body of literature to develop understandings of the practices and merit intrinsic to critical supervision.

Critical social work approaches are fundamental to foster social workers who are critical thinkers, reflective/reflexive, and able to practice social responsivity (Loos & Kostecki, 2018; Morley & Dunstan, 2013). We argue that critical approaches to student field supervision are imperative as a political practice informed by critical pedagogy. By focusing on this aspect of pedagogical practice, we hope to contribute to an ongoing discussion and articulation of critical supervision practices, so that social work students are accommodated in becoming critical thinkers and practitioners.

Our article strengthens and provides some directions to realizing critical practice in social work for emerging practitioners by drawing on insights learned from a recent research project. We begin by introducing the project’s methodology—the interview as dialogic interaction (van Enk, 2009) based upon Bakhtin’s dialogic theory, in order to foreground the learner’s voice, which has “so far been under-represented…through the stories these learners tell” (Harvey, 2015, p. 23). We present parts of a reflective conversation which occurred in 2019 between the external field supervisor (Vaska) and the student (Camille), once the placement had ended.

Dialogism influences the way we have made meaning from these conversations. In this case, our meanings were produced through collaborative conversations between the four authors. In effect, our voices together constitute our discourse. Over time and through multiple conversations, we identified themes that evolved through group conversations orbiting the reflective transcript produced by Vaska and Camille. We concluded our conversational analysis by reflexively situating these conversations in “the wider cultural arena” (Rapley, 2001, p. 319) developing three discursive themes as follows: holding the space, deconstructing neoliberal narratives and, staying with the trouble.

Conversations as a Critical Research Practice: Bakhtin’s Dialogism

Similarly to Harvey (2015), as critical social work practitioners and feminist researchers we aimed to genuinely acknowledge all authors as collaborators in the project and “give them the opportunity to theorize their own experience” (p. 24). Moreover, we wanted “to foreground the learner voices, which have so far been under-represented…through the stories these learners tell” (Harvey, 2015, p. 23). As such, we turned in part to Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895–1975) sociological linguistics as a methodological tool (Bakhtin, 1981). Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism theory frames all discourse as dialogical. At the core of Bakhtin’s view of language is the utterance, and utterances are always dialogic and, “two-sided, created in response to what has been said before and in anticipation of what will be said in reply” (Harvey, 2015, p. 24). According to Bakhtin (1981), “the living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads…it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue.” (pp. 276–277).

Following this principle, we understood that no voice exists in isolation but is shaped by, relates to, and competes with other voices (Bakhtin, 1981). Thus, our conversations were interactive and influenced by the words of the others because “discourse is always riddled with and responsive to what has already been and has yet to be spoken” (van Enk, 2009, p. 1267). The spoken word is open in its potential meaning. Consequently, the dialogical process can expose different assumptions about the creation and meaning of truth and knowledge (Riessman, 2008).

As feminist researchers thinking about power, Bakhtin’s socially and historically grounded concept of language lends itself to our feminist agenda in constantly privileging the marginal and unofficial (Hodge, 2015). Moreover, the dialogic characteristics of language are directed throughout Bakhtin’s work in direct opposition to the monologic and the authoritarian aptly for our feminist viewpoint (Hodge, 2015). Communication in our research project has been an interactive process, where we, as authors, were active agents through reflective processes. Words are living things, “populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” (Bakhtin, 1993 [1920–1924], p. 77). This included the use of prompting questions to guide self-reflections (Frank, 2005) and sharing with one another the analysis of our conversations. In this way, the meanings of our joint conversations were mutually constructed (Hodge, 2019).

Situating the Context and Dialogical Conversations

Following a dialogical method, which considers verbal responses to be “…themselves built on responses to historic utterances made by ourselves and others” (Francis, 2012, p. 4), Vaska and Camille, participated in the deconstruction of their own experiences as acts of engagement alongside Tina and Lisa. In this way, the roles of educator and student were destabilized, and our voices, perspectives, narratives, and knowledges intertwined to create the “data” of our project findings (Hodge, 2015). Our conversations were conducted at a local café, over a 6-month period. A distinguishing feature of dialogic research is including oneself as an active participant in the narrative and its interpretation (Riessman, 2008). Our conversations were not simply a transmission of information but an interactive process, in which both speaker and listener play an active role (Lahteenmaki, 1998).

During the research project, Vaska and Camille met separately from the wider group and engaged in reflective discussion/conversation in relation to the role of critical supervision for student placements. They drew on critical experiences from Camille’s placement and analyzed how critical supervision informed this process in light of the placement context. No formal questions were formed in advance, save for our guiding topic of critical social work supervision and general prompting questions. Their conversations were recorded,transcribed with the transcript, and subsequently shared with the whole group. Throughout the research process, these reflections evolved into further group conversations. When participating in the multiple subsequent conversations that occurred, the research process became a sustained dialogue between all the project group members.

Following Lather and Smithies (1997), we also wanted to position “the reader as thinker, willing to trouble easily the understood and taken for granted.” (p. xvi). Thus, in the spaces we made for the language and stories of Camille and Vaska, we hoped the more engaged the reader might become in the analysis (Abma, 2002, p. 25). Where the text refers to the reader’s own lifeworld and their experiences with the text, additional meaning is possible (Abma, 2002). Therefore, Vaska and Camille’s conversational interview transcripts are woven within this article.

Holding the Space

The most salient theme emerging from our discussions was the nature of the supervisor/student relationship and how it is possible to be experienced as a critical practice. Essentially, the relationship can be a “nest” where trust resides for holding constructive discussions. This relationship nest enables the challenging of biases and assumptions, the sharing of insights, and the development of critical praxis, in what Morley et al. (2019, p. 190) refer to, as a Marxist weaving of theory, practice, and self-reflective agency. This is demonstrated in Vaska’s narrative when she identifies how supervision is not immune to the recursive flow of oppression and privilege stating, there “are huge moments of both empowerment and disempowerment for students.” Vaska further explains the importance of hearing “the difficult narratives that students are presenting” in order to support them in moving, as Morley et al. (2019) suggest, beyond the technocratic and formulaic aspects of working. Vaska and Camille elaborate on this aspect further:
Vaska:…critical supervision is a collaborative space and process where knowledge is constructed between the two of us, it is not a one-way process. It is not about surveying students and testing their “competence” in which they pass or fail, but a nuanced process which rests on ideas of professional and personal development and reflexive practice…also it’s not about giving the student the knowledge or the wisdom, but more about exploring who am I as a practitioner, what theories are important to me?

…ethical dilemmas and tensions in practice are critical for personal and professional development. It’s important that critical social work supervision doesn’t sweep them under the rug or supervisors tell student “that’s how it is”…it’s not about managing those tensions, but addressing them, and asking how you can make change…asking students what are you going to do about this issue in relation to this person?; and all of the other people who may have similar experiences? Is this policy just or unjust? What can you do about it? Working through students’ feelings of disempowerment and challenging their reflective stance, which might be something like, “but I am only a student on placement, what can I do about it?” to “I can have a say and reframe this organization, practice approach, policy, problem, person and community”…Holding the space with students facilitates a teasing out of students’ own professional identity. As part of a collaborative process, I articulate my own professional identity and ask students to begin that journey on placement. This process also allows students to disrupt neoliberal and organizational views of effective practice and practitioners. Critical supervision encourages greater control and efficacy of practice and greater congruence with the values of critical social work practice beyond adaptive, functionalist mandates…This space allows for critical questioning: Who are you as a social worker, what theories are important to you and your practice? Students look at me puzzled but I keep asking as they confront unjust polices and systems and work with oppressed people and communities. It is not just about people you work with, and your colleagues, it is also about you…

By the end of placement student’s practice is really strengthened, clearly and succinctly thinking and articulating the theories that are important to them as a critical practitioner…Critical supervision holds this space in conversations with students that are at times painful, angry and sad. It is about harnessing all of these reflective responses to the demands of the critical social work practitioner within the organizational setting and neoliberalism…being able to defend your position and learning how to theoretically and ethically hold the space, within a schema of social care and social justice…it allows students “to rage against the machine” if you like.

Camille:…when I felt like I didn’t have the support from the team, or my interpretation or professional position wasn’t understood, it made me a lot more uncomfortable in those situations with the young people because it felt like I wasn’t being congruent. That doesn’t sit well with me because transparency and that congruence of your values and how you’re going to practice and interact with people should be present, and that was important to me, to present myself like that to the young people. I needed the space in critical supervision to discuss my values and how that was presenting…The supervision with you…allowed me to express and explore my personal and social values thoroughly…I felt that it was a safe learning space, and I could bring frustrations and challenges. I could also definitely have more in-depth discussions about theoretical perspectives in the external supervision space than I was necessarily able to have in the placement setting. I was able to have good conversations with my task supervisor. They just were of a different nature…it was just a totally different perspective, it was a medical and like individual perspective…I didn’t want to be so open about how I was processing things…personally or professionally.

I feel like the critical supervision space gave me a lot more confidence, just a space to properly critically reflect, to change, and develop my practice. And my theoretical knowledge…you deepen your knowledge because you integrate it with practice. It’s praxis…it’s actually understanding what praxis is and developing it…I needed a critical supervision space to have that. And I think that happened…in how the space was held and I think how you approached our relationship. You walked the journey of my placement alongside me and we had a collaborative relationship…I feel I trusted you…to have my back and to let me work through what I needed to.
As the pervasive societal dynamics of oppression and marginalization enter all personal spaces, including those belonging to the supervisory space, it can become difficult to navigate, affecting the supervisory experience by causing ruptures or impasses (O’Neill & del Mar Farina, 2018). Vaska’s narrative, however, demonstrates how the external field supervisor can “ethically listen” (Hosken & Goldingay, 2016, p. 57) by holding the space. As such, what distinguishes a critical conversation from other conversations is a focus on saturating the dimensions of structural power, privilege, and forces of oppression enacted within the relationship (O’Neill & del Mar Farina, 2018). Using dialogic methods of discourse, the “safe space” that Camille needed in order to explore her personal and social values thoroughly was created as they reflected upon, named and discussed, facilitated understanding, critical awareness, and created new meanings and change (O’Neill & del Mar Farina, 2018).

Camille raises the importance of “congruence” when working with people and within the supervisory relationship. This “congruence” or “transparency” in the exploration of praxis in supervision is expressed in students’ confidence in their interactions with the people with whom they work. Thus, holding the space openly, with attention to exploratory learning and shared power offers itself to ethical practice and its replication in practice. Moreover, safety and trust was required so that Camille “could bring frustrations and challenges” to the supervisory space to be explored without fear of being perceived as incompetent or weak (Egan et al., 2017). Accordingly, there is potential for mutual and rewarding learning. As hooks (1991) points out, “when our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-discovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice” (p. 2). Having spaces to express various forms of knowing (such as personal, educational, professional) and connect to critical theory/approaches allows for a grounded, dynamic, and living exploration of praxis.

Deconstructing Neoliberal Narratives

Neoliberalism is grounded in the belief that a competitive and unfettered market offers choices and freedom for citizens. However, because human suffering is built into the political economy of advanced capitalist societies, freedom and choice are not equally accessible (Paul, 2016). Morley et al. (2017) point to social activism as an important aspect of practicing the art of social work. In her narrative, Vaska suggests that the ability “to disrupt the language and practices of managerialism and neoliberalism in understanding people’s distress and the definition of the ‘problem’” is “a key practice of critical supervision.” Without critical supervision and practice, as Baines (2017) posits, neoliberal imperatives in workplaces underpinned by capitalist markets can depoliticize social work, reducing it to a technical profession, the antithesis of a social justice–engaged vocation. Baines and Waugh (2019) highlight these practice approaches as focusing on “risk avoidance rather than anti-oppressive organisational change” (p. 257) and “pro-market individualising and victim blaming ethos of neoliberalism” (p. 251). This is the political context in which social work students are enmeshed during placement no matter the practice context since practice policy mirrors broader political and social structures, systems and ideologies. Tellingly, Baines and Waugh (2019) and others (Baines, 2017; Carey, 2011; Morley, 2011) have argued that resistance and critical reflection can be difficult to accomplish in neoliberal, managerialized spaces.

We believe critical supervision with students on placement can address this struggle and provide them with frameworks to develop the critical analytical skills to deconstruct narratives and processes that are inherent in neoliberal social work practice contexts. Critical supervision can herald the beginning of a lifelong critical social work professional journey, even as they may sit in disempowering work spaces and as “social workers in training.” For us as a group of critical practitioners and academics, assisting students to deconstruct neoliberal narratives in practice is a fundamental characteristic of critical supervision practice.

Critical practice is more than teaching skills and techniques. We need to prepare students to continue to facilitate social change for equitable and socially just societies in contexts of globalized economies and technologies (Morley, 2008) because neoliberal values hold direct implications for how social work practitioners operate in the field (Morley et al., 2019). Additionally, overreliance on technicist approaches (Morley et al., 2019) often assumed to be separate from theory, deny how and why we choose to use skills in our practice at particular times and can be guided by assumptions and values that reflect various, unnamed theoretical positions (Morley, 2008). This leaves students unclear about how to relate critical theory to practice (Morley, 2008).

Noble et al. (2016) demonstrate how, as critical human service workers, personal reflective practice is a starting point for a “relational, service user-centred mode of thinking” (p. 106). Personal reflective practice is extended so that, “the practitioner’s own experiences and ideas move to the periphery and in-depth critical analysis of the service user’s ideas and perspectives is placed on centre stage” (p. 106). Thus, power intersects with economic standing and socially created cultural identifiers, such as race and gender, and should be woven into supervision conversations (Hair, 2015). In the following conversation, Camille describes how “neoliberal and risk adverse narratives are overarching and normalized,” and Vaska responds by demonstrating how “the language and practices of managerialism and neoliberalism” can be disrupted or “debunked” as a critical supervision practice:
Camille:…the neoliberal aspect, I think that was something that I noticed or definitely came to a head during my placement work when they were going through the process of applying/reapplying for their funding, and that was a major source of conflict for the team I was working in. Between them and the school and the managing staff of the well-being team, the heads of the wellbeing department, there was a real clash between the caring professionals. If I could align social workers in the same group as counsellors and psychologists against the, almost against the school and the administration staff and how they wanted to secure funding, and I feel like that was a real neoliberal aspect because they were really challenging professional, ethical codes and practice and trying to say this is the function, this is why we need to do it and you can’t do your job unless you follow our rules.

The intersectional lens…I guess it was in the listening, reflecting with you in supervision about sessions I was observing where I was listening to narratives where I was picking out structural aspects to the problems that were being presented or the distress that maybe weren’t always being picked out by counsellors. Not that I was doing better than them, but just that I was picking out different things and there would have been different questions I would have asked if I was leading sessions and things like that. You know because they were mostly only looking from that medical model approach of “what is wrong with you?” Perhaps, since I was an outsider to that system, I was recognizing some of the distress as effected by the school’s structures. Vaska, you acknowledged and frequently named the oppressive nature of systems and structures. And we talked about how working within them is often a practice of resistance. Because you know, those narratives are normalized in the organisations.

Because I come from the social perspective where it’s more than just these individual problems that the students are coming with and you want to create a safe…To me, the ideal school environment is one that is a community-based environment which looks at it holistically and outside of this individual psychological mental health problem and let’s see how we can make this a safest community space for somebody to be. And from a trauma informed perspective, systems can be very traumatizing. I didn’t want to be working for an institution in which they (the young people) felt traumatized or untrusted or something.

Vaska: The perception by students and by extension, social work practitioners that theories taught in the classroom operate differently in practice. Students hear things on placement such as “this is real world practice now…that idealism belongs in the classroom”…critical supervision needs to challenge this conservative de-politicized view of practice. Critical pedagogy straddles both spheres (classroom and practice), and if it is not addressed students can be reduced to feeling as though their practice does not make a difference, that it is impossible to be working in an anti-oppressive way or practice from a social justice perspective, or think these things are only possible in theory or in the classroom.

We need to interrogate the narrative of the “competent” practitioner where the role is about upholding functional assessments and interventions as “real” social work, and reframe this as a co-constructed space which is less directive and more exploratory, and whereby students, practitioners and field educators should not hide behind “competence” but embrace the “uncomfortable and not knowing” which emerges because of reflexivity…facilitating a space in which there is a re/construction of professional identity, which is at once liberating, uncertain and exciting…

Critical supervision should disrupt the language and practices of managerialism and neoliberalism in understanding people’s situations and the definition of the “problem”…really start to deconstruct what it is the organization is asking of you as a worker and then developing and constructing your own professional identity according to your values and theories in that context…it might be at odds with the organizational context…a critical approach to supervision can offer…the opportunity to explore what values are really important…and how they don’t always align with human service sector organisations which is often based in risk-averse processes where people are managed…not practicing formulaic and technocratic aspects like making sure the assessment’s filled in correctly, that you’ve done all the templates as opposed to actually listening and being engaged with what the person is trying to say-focusing on the risk assessment but missing the narrative of oppression…

…learning to find your way through all of the competing discourses and ideologies and where critical social work might not be valued…and then you have to go in and really reframe practice…saying well, there’s this particular way in which you’re practicing from, but no, my professional legitimacy is that you can also do work from this other framework, using a different lens and theoretical base, which allows for critical alternatives…because I think there’s a bit of a doubt that starts to creep in “how can I do this?” and move to “I can do this”…
Drawing on a critically reflective approach to practice, underpinned with critical theories such as feminism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism (Morley, 2009), Vaska illustrates the importance of developing and interrogating professional identity through a critical approach to supervision. Such a theoretical base explicates how power and privilege operate in the conversation to raise critical consciousness, and such conversations “are rarely finished in one setting; rather, they develop and continue in myriad ways” (Kang & O’Neill, 2018, p. 189). In this way, Camille was able to critically reflect on what she identified as “a psychology/medical model approach to supervision” experienced at the placement setting and her need to develop her critical lens when hearing the stories of young people. Furthermore, Camille and Vaska are using critical reflection for the purposes of challenging and changing dominant power relations and structures at an interpersonal level (Morley, 2008) toward structural and anti-oppressive perspectives. Together, they unearth the implicit values and assumptions that are embedded in their critical social work practice and compare this to how practice actually corresponds with their intended use of theory. By way of interrogating dominant theories including the constraints of the practice setting, new ways to reframe and reconstruct practice from a critical perspective are attainable.

Neoliberal politics and conditions seek to individualize and isolate people, so any shared or collective solidarity and connection defies that pressure (Morley & Dunstan, 2013). This is especially so during placement, where students can be isolated from peers and sometimes hold a questionably legitimate status in the staff group within the placement agency. To be critically reflective, social work students are required to take a leap into vulnerability in order to engage deeply with self and professional development in the workspace (hooks, 1991). Ideally, this level of vulnerability and accountability, mutually expressed in the supervisory space and the placement team space, is shared, and reflected in working cultures that center the people with whom we work, while also caring for team members, including students.

An element of this accountability recognizes the student as an emerging practitioner in these systems. The critical supervisory space is one where knowledge and experiences are shared including the exegesis of social structures and systems (Jarldorn, 2020; Morley et al., 2017). Students and newly graduated social workers otherwise risk a replication of oppression alongside the people with whom they work (Jarldorn, 2020). In neoliberal contexts this means they face additional expectations to meet employer demands (Jarldorn, 2020; Morley & Dunstan, 2013; Morley et al., 2019), leaving scant scope for realizing and expressing critical emancipatory theories in practice.

“Staying with the Trouble”

We have found Haraway’s (2016) thesis in “Staying with the Trouble” holds a useful metaphor in defining a part of our approach to critical supervision practices. Haraway (2016) argues for a decentering of humans when conceptualizing current global issues. Instead, she suggests installing the notion of relationality (webs of relatedness differently to hierarchy). This mirrors our own perspectives in the value and merit of critical social work supervision. Through our conversations as a group, it has been apparent that as educators, and particularly in a critical social work program, we have an ethical responsibility to remain attentive and engaged with issues of social justice and equity. Often when students are on placement, supervision becomes competency based and functional in terms of assessment and expectations. The placement experience can become distilled to being simply, job training.

Thus, as critical social workers and educators, we need to demonstrate the ways we can work with and within complex social service and policy contexts in ways that challenge, disrupt, affirm, or alter existing social relations to create parity with our values of social justice and equity. In the classroom, there is emphasis on critical analysis, solidarity, and principles of equality and so too should social work placements be a site for critical pedagogy. After all, in an age where despair, mental well-being, and alienation are significant concerns, should we not privilege civic/community engagement, issues of agency, structural analysis of social issues, and how visions for the future can be explored and strategies for implementation developed? We believe that students on placement contribute to the development of cultures, values, and practices in powerful ways, and it is the notion of relationality in critical supervision practices (and in the classroom) which are indispensable to countering repressive systems.

It is onerous and arduous to reconstruct a critical self and practice as a student on placement requiring constant reflection on professional identity and what may constitute critical praxis in disparate contexts. Critical supervision through relationality and “staying with the trouble” empowers students to explore resistance to the neoliberal pull of practice, language, and enculturation which can divert from embracing social justice practice and collaborative work undertaken with people (Morley et al., 2017; Noble et al., 2016). Critical social work is demanding and the journey begins on the first day of placement, allowing them to stay the distance through developing skill in challenge/questioning and resistance as part of a lifelong practice beyond the immediacy of the placement experience.
Vaska: There’s so much happening on placement students have constant challenges and dilemmas as do supervisors, but there are moments in which those challenges become moments of major epiphanies. I am both elated and concerned when this happens for students as they are huge moments of both empowerment and disempowerment; epiphanies of sorts, but reconciling it with the rigorous and oppressive facets of practice within a neoliberal context, which can be liberating For example, the questions are answered…Am I being oppressive? What does it mean to be a critical AOP worker and how can I do this in this context? These normal critical professional questions cause fragmentation and ruptures of our professional identity, and are then constantly re/constructed over time to a more congruent sense of the personal and professional self…thinking about critical social work supervision as a continuum…where you start your journey…

Critical supervision holds this space in conversations that are at times painful, angry and sad. It is about harnessing all of these reflective responses in relation to the demands of the social work practitioner within a neoliberal setting. Students can develop their critical position and learn to theoretically and ethically hold it and challenge practices that may be unjust and oppressive…placement as part of a “signature pedagogy” is where we expect students to actually integrate theory to practice…and critical supervision should interrogate the risk-averse approaches which focus on individualized treatments or options for people who are feeling distressed, and link them to processes and systems which are oppressive, this is imperative…

Camille: What was constraining about the organisational context came back a lot to values. Going into that organisation, I was aware that I was going to be challenged by it being a religious Catholic school, which I was, and obviously that was something I had to work through with you. Which was good because you challenged me as to what my biases were against it, I don’t necessarily have to accept their values, but I can understand what the place they had. I think a big part of that organisational context was their religious values. And I was able to do that because I respected and trusted you.

If I hadn’t had critical supervision I don’t feel I actually would’ve learned as much on my placement because the context in a lot of ways didn’t really fit my understanding and learning, what I would learned would have been just different because I think I would have had to change my practice approaches. I think I would have had to really try and fit into a psychological approach. I witnessed some really amazing work by the psychologist and there were methods that they did that I would like to learn how to do, but sometimes I just didn’t, wouldn’t have the same assessment and if I hadn’t been able to explore that, I feel like it actually probably would’ve made me less confident about my professional approach and probably a bit confused because there were times where I felt confused where I was, where I came to you and said, “Oh, I feel like I don’t know how to do that and I don’t know how to do this.” And then it was an affirmation of knowing you have these skills. There were skills I had that were applicable in that setting which were not brought out by the service I was in. The way our supervisions went just kind allowed me to work through the really challenging parts of that placement and stick with the theories and approaches I know. The ones that help me explain and see the world and the problems in it. That was really important to developing my own expression of…my professional identity.
Camille again emphasizes trust and safety as being paramount in the supervisory relationship, suggesting that beliefs and values sometimes arise out of one’s own traumatic experiences. Such deeply felt issues can have personal impacts on students and when not addressed, issues of power and privilege can derail learning (Kang & O’Neill, 2018). Moreover, such dynamics and critical issues not addressed, become silenced, replicating marginalization, while at the same time sending mixed messages to students about the profession’s commitment to social justice (Kang & O’Neill, 2018).

Developing and Sustaining Critical Supervision Practices

Arguably, one of the most detrimental impacts of neoliberalism on social work supervision and practice is the shift away from critical analysis to the privileging of an administrative approach based on risk-averse approaches and the learning/teaching of technical skills (Morley et al., 2017). Technicist and oppressive approaches depoliticize structural causes of social problems, resulting in scapegoating marginalized groups for difficulties arising from complex and divided social, economic, and political contexts (Morley et al., 2017, Noble et al., 2016). In situating our understandings of critical social work supervision for students on placement, we believe in congruence with key principles of critical supervision for social workers; that it be transformative, pursue a social justice agenda, anti-oppressive and is culturally relevant. Importantly that it be relational and facilitated within a learning organization (Noble et al., 2016, p. 144).

We occupy multiple roles as critical educators, researchers, activists, students, and field educators, and through these multiple locations, we believe that a critical approach to supervision needs to be articulated, explored, nurtured, and demonstrated on placement with students in order to develop practitioners who align their practice with social justice endeavors and challenge neoliberal approaches that seek to depoliticize practice. Therefore, we provide the following essential steps for practicing critical supervision with students on placement, which supervisors can follow:
Support students in articulating critical theory in practice, no matter the neoliberal space and practice constraints. This includes facilitating the understanding that there is no ideal practice setting and that critical social work practice is possible anywhere alongside the development of thinking beyond competencies.

Assist students to develop ways to engage in the neoliberal realities of practice that do not defeat them or their critical practices but instead, provide them with their own clear mandates for critical praxis.

Listen ethically to students. Critical supervisors hear, witness, validate and explore inherent tensions in practice, and work collaboratively with students to develop and strengthen practice responses and professional identity as critical social workers.

Support the student in developing their understanding that social work field education is a social justice endeavor alongside critical theory approaches in the classroom and courses. The expression of this must also occur in the supervision space where the development of critical practice is encouraged and realized.

Work with critical social work pedagogy that is strengthened in supervision within moments of critical epiphanies on placement. These are the critical junctures of professional and personal development and not moments of incompetence or ineptitude.

Conclusion

Critical social work supervision can provide a strategy to connect the emancipatory aims of critical theory with social work practice and congruence with anti-oppressive practice enabling consistency between espoused theory and practice (Morley et al., 2017). Critical social work and supervision do not sugarcoat practice, with its inherent challenges, practice in neoliberal contexts. Critical supervision provides an avenue to corroborate critical social work curriculum.

As activists, scholars and researchers, we were willing in this article to “trouble” the understood and taken for granted and to navigate “the necessary blind spots of understanding” (Lather, 2007, p. viii) by taking a dialogic approach to the research. We have resisted being constrained by dominant paradigms of truth, and instead, our reflective conversations became “not the last word, but the first in making room for something else to come about” (Lather, 2007, p. 7).

Critical social work supervision moves beyond person-centered practice in taking a position to redress structural inequality and social justice. As a constituent of critical social work practice, it can contribute to longevity and sustainability for students in light of neoliberal constraints. Due to the complexity of oppression under neoliberalism, critical approaches in social work education need to use a diversity of methods (Houston, 2012). For us, student placements and critical supervision in relation to emerging critical practice is a part of that journey.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Tina Kostecki

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