The growing ethno-racial diversity reflected in Canadian society has prompted increased academic ... more The growing ethno-racial diversity reflected in Canadian society has prompted increased academic interest, particularly in the field of social work, in understanding how people from different ethno-racial groups experience and perceive the world. In this paper, we talk about the challenges of creating such knowledge, or engaging in "cross-cultural research". We focus this discussion on three main dimensions of the
Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research
This article explores the problems and potential of funded short-term cross-sector partnerships t... more This article explores the problems and potential of funded short-term cross-sector partnerships to address technological deficits in the nonprofit sector by engaging with the partners of a concluded project. The partnership case study that forms the backbone of this article was a three-year nationally funded nonprofit-industry-academic partnership. The ob- jective of the partnership was to increase the data collection capacity of a national nonprofit organization and its affiliate centres through the development of a web-based app. This article highlights the challenges and differing experiences of nonprofit-industry-academic partnerships more generally, and technology-development partnerships more specifically.
While clinical social work has a strong conceptual understanding of uncertainty, there is a lack ... more While clinical social work has a strong conceptual understanding of uncertainty, there is a lack of empirical data on how practitioners navigate uncertainty in practice. This paper reports findings of the data generated from a simulation-based pilot study designed to explore clinical social workers’ encounters with uncertainty and the strategies they use to navigate it. Experienced clinicians ( n = 4), recent graduates ( n = 4) and graduate students ( n = 3) participated in a 30-min video recorded case-based simulated session with a live standardized client (SC). Using standardized clients, simulation-based research methodology allowed us to capture moment-to-moment practice behaviours and decisions among social workers. Following each simulation, participants reviewed the video-recorded sessions and engaged in an audio-recorded reflective dialogue with a researcher. Two themes emerged from the data sets: (1) there is a variation between less experienced participants who navigated uncertainty in pragmatic, task focused ways and more experienced practitioners who focused on the wider relationship with the client; and (2) less experienced practitioners tended towards struggling against uncertainty while more experienced practitioners demonstrated an ability to sit and wade within it. These findings offer several implications for clinical social work research and practice, including the important role that simulation methodologies have in exploring clinical practice and the need to understand specific aspects of uncertainty in clinical practice.
In this article I explore the stories of nine white, middle-class feminist community organizers, ... more In this article I explore the stories of nine white, middle-class feminist community organizers, told during a series of individual interviews and discussion groups. The women participating in this project did so following a number of years of us working together as feminists and community organizers. During our discussions it became clear that our secular work was entwined with personal stories of religion and spirituality. In addition, I argue that our stories are shaped by a broader social discourse about social work and community organizing, which similarly negotiates spaces between secularity, religiosity and spirituality. Reflecting on these stories and the way we tell them, I suggest that a more integrated understanding of secular feminist organizing, as constituted through notions of the sacred, opens up new spaces for thinking about feminist community development.
Highlights • The emotional/affective landscape of professors within the neoliberal university. • ... more Highlights • The emotional/affective landscape of professors within the neoliberal university. • Development of worry as both an affect and an emotion. • The bind of professional schools in the context of neoliberal change. • Resistance to decontextualized understanding of caring.
ABSTRACTAlthough field education is considered the signature pedagogy of social work, the work of... more ABSTRACTAlthough field education is considered the signature pedagogy of social work, the work of field coordinators appear to remain peripheral to other aspects of social work education, such as coursework and research. In this article, we suggest that field coordination requires a far more complex set of knowledge and skills than merely matching students with placements based on availability and interest. Using critical and relational theories, this article conceptualizes field coordination as a negotiated pedagogy in which the coordinators navigate complex and often competing needs among students, field agencies, and social work practice. In making visible its nuances and intricacies, we suggest that field coordination is a critical relational pedagogy essential to advancing social work education.
ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore ways in which social work educators might respond to students ... more ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore ways in which social work educators might respond to students who report that mental health issues underlie their difficulty in meeting core competencies, or otherwise use the language of mental health to describe their struggles to succeed in social work programs. We discuss various trends in policy responses in Canada, the US, the UK, and Ireland. While there are general policy trends, it is clear that responding to these kinds of issues requires the development of highly flexible and situated policy processes that can respond to student realities, concern for students’ rights and privacy, and an awareness of potential discrimination against students. These processes also need to meet the specificities of practicums, particular institutional policies, the mandates of relevant professional bodies, and the precise local legislative framework that shapes these situations. Given these varying contexts, in this conceptual paper, we used a framework on disability that is informed by critical theory to engage existing school policies and propose a set of reflective questions that can guide schools of social work to create an overall responsive environment. These reflective questions are designed to help social work educators balance the rights and needs of students with the professional and institutional demands that students meet core competencies in their education.
Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2016
This article of linked, short essays reflecting on the experiences of five female scholars across... more This article of linked, short essays reflecting on the experiences of five female scholars across three disciplines — law, social work and political science - draws upon Britzman’s (1991) notion of the “dialogic discourse” to explore how these professors’ sense of self is constituted through interplay with colleagues and their perceptions of students within the classroom. The authors explore the teacher/learner relationship as a dialogue within which learners and educators shape each other as they come to understand how and what they know. What the collection makes explicit is what is often only implicit, that the ways in which professors understand their practices and subjective self is central to the identity of “a professor”, which is never stable or certain, but is always a creative practice. Such practices, we argue, are best sustained through collegial reflective practices that help us make sense of ourselves and continue our work. Cet article consiste de courts essais reliés ...
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2016
In this article we explore a Canadian example of how the language of innovation reproduces discou... more In this article we explore a Canadian example of how the language of innovation reproduces discourses of neoliberalism in postsecondary education policy documents. How innovation is defined and used in postsecondary education is explored through the analysis of international and regional policy documents. Through our research we ask how has the global discourse of innovation been incorporated into the transformation of postsecondary education in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Further we ask the question, what does innovation signify in the policies and directives of postsecondary institutions in Ontario? As well, does innovation reproduce neoliberal discourses of profitability, uncertainty and the knowledge economy when it is situated in policies that affect postsecondary governance? We argue that innovation is a discursive practice with specific and profound impacts on the language of higher education. By focusing on the province of Ontario, we were able to explore how documents produced by the government and its related agencies about higher education encourage innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship in an attempt to increase productivity. Although this discourse of innovation is rooted in historic processes of liberalism, specific policy initiatives, such as the Strategic Mandate Agreements discussed in this article, bring the discourse of innovation into sharp focus and underline a preoccupation with the priorities of neoliberal governance. We call for a broader discussion about the meaning and purpose of the discourses of innovation, creativity, productivity, and entrepreneurship in higher education. Without this type of interrogation these discourses function as an episteme that is assumed to have a widespread, a priori value, which may obscure the dramatic transformations, such as the move to tailor education solely to the market economy, the rise of reductive outcome measures for student and faculty evaluation, the commercialization of knowledge, the pursuit of efficiencies in the postsecondary sector, and the corporatization of governance that are occurring within higher education.
The growing ethno-racial diversity reflected in Canadian society has prompted increased academic ... more The growing ethno-racial diversity reflected in Canadian society has prompted increased academic interest, particularly in the field of social work, in understanding how people from different ethno-racial groups experience and perceive the world. In this paper, we talk about the challenges of creating such knowledge, or engaging in "cross-cultural research". We focus this discussion on three main dimensions of the
Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research
This article explores the problems and potential of funded short-term cross-sector partnerships t... more This article explores the problems and potential of funded short-term cross-sector partnerships to address technological deficits in the nonprofit sector by engaging with the partners of a concluded project. The partnership case study that forms the backbone of this article was a three-year nationally funded nonprofit-industry-academic partnership. The ob- jective of the partnership was to increase the data collection capacity of a national nonprofit organization and its affiliate centres through the development of a web-based app. This article highlights the challenges and differing experiences of nonprofit-industry-academic partnerships more generally, and technology-development partnerships more specifically.
While clinical social work has a strong conceptual understanding of uncertainty, there is a lack ... more While clinical social work has a strong conceptual understanding of uncertainty, there is a lack of empirical data on how practitioners navigate uncertainty in practice. This paper reports findings of the data generated from a simulation-based pilot study designed to explore clinical social workers’ encounters with uncertainty and the strategies they use to navigate it. Experienced clinicians ( n = 4), recent graduates ( n = 4) and graduate students ( n = 3) participated in a 30-min video recorded case-based simulated session with a live standardized client (SC). Using standardized clients, simulation-based research methodology allowed us to capture moment-to-moment practice behaviours and decisions among social workers. Following each simulation, participants reviewed the video-recorded sessions and engaged in an audio-recorded reflective dialogue with a researcher. Two themes emerged from the data sets: (1) there is a variation between less experienced participants who navigated uncertainty in pragmatic, task focused ways and more experienced practitioners who focused on the wider relationship with the client; and (2) less experienced practitioners tended towards struggling against uncertainty while more experienced practitioners demonstrated an ability to sit and wade within it. These findings offer several implications for clinical social work research and practice, including the important role that simulation methodologies have in exploring clinical practice and the need to understand specific aspects of uncertainty in clinical practice.
In this article I explore the stories of nine white, middle-class feminist community organizers, ... more In this article I explore the stories of nine white, middle-class feminist community organizers, told during a series of individual interviews and discussion groups. The women participating in this project did so following a number of years of us working together as feminists and community organizers. During our discussions it became clear that our secular work was entwined with personal stories of religion and spirituality. In addition, I argue that our stories are shaped by a broader social discourse about social work and community organizing, which similarly negotiates spaces between secularity, religiosity and spirituality. Reflecting on these stories and the way we tell them, I suggest that a more integrated understanding of secular feminist organizing, as constituted through notions of the sacred, opens up new spaces for thinking about feminist community development.
Highlights • The emotional/affective landscape of professors within the neoliberal university. • ... more Highlights • The emotional/affective landscape of professors within the neoliberal university. • Development of worry as both an affect and an emotion. • The bind of professional schools in the context of neoliberal change. • Resistance to decontextualized understanding of caring.
ABSTRACTAlthough field education is considered the signature pedagogy of social work, the work of... more ABSTRACTAlthough field education is considered the signature pedagogy of social work, the work of field coordinators appear to remain peripheral to other aspects of social work education, such as coursework and research. In this article, we suggest that field coordination requires a far more complex set of knowledge and skills than merely matching students with placements based on availability and interest. Using critical and relational theories, this article conceptualizes field coordination as a negotiated pedagogy in which the coordinators navigate complex and often competing needs among students, field agencies, and social work practice. In making visible its nuances and intricacies, we suggest that field coordination is a critical relational pedagogy essential to advancing social work education.
ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore ways in which social work educators might respond to students ... more ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore ways in which social work educators might respond to students who report that mental health issues underlie their difficulty in meeting core competencies, or otherwise use the language of mental health to describe their struggles to succeed in social work programs. We discuss various trends in policy responses in Canada, the US, the UK, and Ireland. While there are general policy trends, it is clear that responding to these kinds of issues requires the development of highly flexible and situated policy processes that can respond to student realities, concern for students’ rights and privacy, and an awareness of potential discrimination against students. These processes also need to meet the specificities of practicums, particular institutional policies, the mandates of relevant professional bodies, and the precise local legislative framework that shapes these situations. Given these varying contexts, in this conceptual paper, we used a framework on disability that is informed by critical theory to engage existing school policies and propose a set of reflective questions that can guide schools of social work to create an overall responsive environment. These reflective questions are designed to help social work educators balance the rights and needs of students with the professional and institutional demands that students meet core competencies in their education.
Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 2016
This article of linked, short essays reflecting on the experiences of five female scholars across... more This article of linked, short essays reflecting on the experiences of five female scholars across three disciplines — law, social work and political science - draws upon Britzman’s (1991) notion of the “dialogic discourse” to explore how these professors’ sense of self is constituted through interplay with colleagues and their perceptions of students within the classroom. The authors explore the teacher/learner relationship as a dialogue within which learners and educators shape each other as they come to understand how and what they know. What the collection makes explicit is what is often only implicit, that the ways in which professors understand their practices and subjective self is central to the identity of “a professor”, which is never stable or certain, but is always a creative practice. Such practices, we argue, are best sustained through collegial reflective practices that help us make sense of ourselves and continue our work. Cet article consiste de courts essais reliés ...
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2016
In this article we explore a Canadian example of how the language of innovation reproduces discou... more In this article we explore a Canadian example of how the language of innovation reproduces discourses of neoliberalism in postsecondary education policy documents. How innovation is defined and used in postsecondary education is explored through the analysis of international and regional policy documents. Through our research we ask how has the global discourse of innovation been incorporated into the transformation of postsecondary education in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Further we ask the question, what does innovation signify in the policies and directives of postsecondary institutions in Ontario? As well, does innovation reproduce neoliberal discourses of profitability, uncertainty and the knowledge economy when it is situated in policies that affect postsecondary governance? We argue that innovation is a discursive practice with specific and profound impacts on the language of higher education. By focusing on the province of Ontario, we were able to explore how documents produced by the government and its related agencies about higher education encourage innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship in an attempt to increase productivity. Although this discourse of innovation is rooted in historic processes of liberalism, specific policy initiatives, such as the Strategic Mandate Agreements discussed in this article, bring the discourse of innovation into sharp focus and underline a preoccupation with the priorities of neoliberal governance. We call for a broader discussion about the meaning and purpose of the discourses of innovation, creativity, productivity, and entrepreneurship in higher education. Without this type of interrogation these discourses function as an episteme that is assumed to have a widespread, a priori value, which may obscure the dramatic transformations, such as the move to tailor education solely to the market economy, the rise of reductive outcome measures for student and faculty evaluation, the commercialization of knowledge, the pursuit of efficiencies in the postsecondary sector, and the corporatization of governance that are occurring within higher education.
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Papers by Sarah Todd