The Practice Guide

We all probably already work with the concepts of participation and reflexivity and have considerable experience and a well-grounded understanding of them. However, when the international consortium designing this guide started to discuss the concepts and particularly their practice among the partners from five countries, we had to revisit some very fundamental questions and complex issues. This guide is intended to share these insights with colleagues irrespective of their level of experience with participative approaches. 

Our first question was: why promote participation and reflexivity in professional education, and why to consider both in relation to each other?

Our premise is that social workers have an important role as professional partners of disadvantaged, frail, and health-challenged people who are at risk of being excluded from full citizenship in society and of not having a "voice". Kessl (2009) asserts that social work should act as a critical agency, an agency oriented at offering or creating new options to service users which they had previously missed or been denied. They are frequently confronted with offers of solutions to their difficulties on which they were not consulted and over which they have no control. Largely as a result of the lobbying by self-help and service user movements, their participation in social work practice development, social work research, and social work education on topics affecting their lives is being incorporated into the legislation of several countries. Various forms of participative practice have already been developed (see Fung, 2006; Krumer-Nevo, 2005, 2008; Ní Shé et al., 2019). In the drive to make services more responsive to the concerns of 'welfare recipients' as service users, their participation has been recognized as a contribution to the democratization of public service delivery regimes (Beresford, 2010; Garrett, 2019). This progress relates to the wider "participatory democracy turn", which has also become part of the public mandate of social work since the 1990s (Beresford, 2010; Garrett, 2019).

The concept of participation can be summed up as all people "having a voice". Expressing one's voice has become a core attribute of modern citizenship, as the idea of autonomy and participation in public life has evolved since the era of the enlightenment. However, reflections on historical and contemporary transformations of welfare approaches make clear that all versions of citizenship and rights were established only gradually and remained only partially granted to certain sections of the population (Kessl, 2009; Dewanckel et al., 2021). Citizenship and rights were only extended as consequences of social and political struggles in which social movements like the labour, feminist, civil rights, children's rights, and disability rights movements played a key role. However, forms of insecure citizenship, or so-called 'denizenship' (Turner, 2016), are currently of great concern to social workers. Recent neoliberal policies contribute to the erosion of protective structures and solidarity towards citizens. When people have formal but not substantiated citizenship rights, or lack citizenship rights totally as migrants according to the prevailing territorial logic, it is the task of social workers to make citizenship a lived experience. Creating opportunities for real participation in public life, and hence also in educational processes, assumes great political significance. As the value of participation has been raised in relation to service users, it has soon become clear that the inequality also concerns other fields of relationships in professional work – for example, the inequality between social and health care workers, between nurses and medical doctors, between field workers and managers etc. Therefore, in this project, all kinds of situations and examples were discussed, where reflexivity and participation can contribute to better collaboration.   

The social and political transformations highlight that when social workers practice participatively, they have to be prepared to encounter conflict in practice as well as in education. Taking participation seriously means being prepared to challenge and confront norms, power structures and power relationships, and systemic inequalities. "Agency" through participation carries a pedagogical mandate: how to facilitate people to have a "voice". "Taking voice" transforms private concerns into public issues and necessarily involves a complex public and democratic learning process in which social work plays an important part (Grunwald & Thiersch, 2009). Our proposals for ways of enhancing participation in social work education are therefore intricately linked to promoting reflective competences. These recognize the complexity of change processes which span from the individual and psychological level to the structural and political sphere.

We observed in what forms principles of participation can be detected in practice, research and education in social work in the 5 countries of the consortium. We concluded that in all cases, they are framed by political agendas centred on status or power issues. These agendas can either promote or impede the development of meaningful approaches to participation. Hence, we conclude that each course and research programme need to carefully analyze those framework conditions to be able to develop an independent and critical position towards such influences. The dynamic interplay is summarised in the following diagram.

Diagram 1: The 'triangle' of teaching, research, and practice with a focus on power aspects in O1)

The value of participation, which expresses the ethos of democracy, can be easily subverted and reduced to mere tokenism, a danger which was noted in all countries participating in this project. It has parallels with a trend towards the tokenistic and populist erosion of democracy itself (Rosanvallon, 2011). One of the hallmarks of professional social work is the recognition of the rights of service users as full citizens whose voice has a decisive and not just consultative influence on decisions concerning their lives. 

Link to Lay or/and professional

In some cultural and national contexts, this orientation finds expression in social pedagogical approaches. Social pedagogy seeks to engage people of all ages in life-long, mutual learning projects where informal and formal sources of knowledge and experience are brought together participatively (Köngeter & Schröer, 2013). 

For professional social work, participation does not negate the existence of differences in knowledge, power and resources. Instead, it raises the question of to which extent excluded, marginalized, and powerless people can be facilitated to make use of available resources as of right without becoming dependent on support. This ambiguity is inherent to the public mandate of social work and therefore can only be constructively and situation-specifically resolved through reflexivity. When dealing with complex issues, like how to recognize one's own preconceptions, facing the history and context of problematic social conditions, addressing power relations transparently and promoting realistic possibilities of change, reflective competences are needed to make participatory practice meaningful at every step. When we subject our professional methods and strategies to the scrutiny of service users, a reflective dialogue can be generated that enables both "experts" and service users to critically review routine coping strategies and to learn new skills as a result. 

Link to Struggle of professional social work with complexity, ambitious expectations and blaming

Participation and reflexivity are understood in this Practice Guide as twins, necessary to be learned and developed continually together with the relevant partners in health and social work education, practice and research. 

Positive effects of (greater) participation O2