4 Involving people with lived experience
Open University social work academics collaborate with advisory groups from each nation of the UK, comprising of people with lived experience, to ensure that a broad range of voices and perspectives inform teaching materials and the broader curriculum. Representatives from these advisory groups have been integral to the development and design of this unit, helping to ensure that the content is not only relevant and inclusive, but that it is also grounded in real-world experiences.
As Raj and Peter identified in Audio 1, it is not only terminology that has evolved over many years, but also the roles and remit of people with lived experience of social work. They talked about some of the ways they, and others, have become increasingly involved in social work education.
Involving people with lived experience can give prominence to elements of knowledge that are not always visible in academic publications and these insights can highlight how social work practice is experienced in everyday life. Hearing directly from people who have interacted with services can challenge assumptions and encourage students to reflect on how their actions as future social workers may affect the people they support.
Activity 4 Involving people with liver experience in social work education
People who have lived experience of social work services can play an important role in shaping how future social workers learn. In this activity you will think about how their perspectives can be included in the development of social work education.
Think about the ways in which people with lived experience might contribute to the different stages of developing and delivering a social work course or module – e.g. planning content, writing learning materials and activities, designing assessments and evaluating the content.
Note down some of the ways people with loved experience of social work could meaningfully be involved in this.
As you do this, you could also consider the following questions:
- What knowledge or insight might they bring?
- How might their involvement influence what students learn?
- What would meaningful involvement look like in practice?
Discussion
You may have identified a range of ways that people with lived experience of social work can contribute to social work education. When developing the content for this course people with lived experience were involved in several ways, including:
- Shaping content: Their perspectives helped inform the development of key topics and learning materials so that the content reflected the realities of interacting with social work services.
- Content creation: Some people with lived experience wrote sections for this course, while others created audio or visual materials for students to engage with.
- Providing critical feedback: Draft materials were reviewed and discussed within the team, which included people with lived experience of social work. This created opportunities to reflect critically on language choices, assumptions, representations of experience and principles of anti-oppressive practice.
- Ensuring diverse perspectives: The team included people with lived experience from across the four nations of the UK. Individuals brought different forms of experience, helping ensure the content reflected a broad range of perspectives.
This approach aimed to support co-production, where knowledge from lived experience is valued alongside professional and academic expertise. To learn more about co-production in social work education, please visit the following website: Co-production: challenges and opportunities for the Higher Education curriculum [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .
Now you have explored the importance of recognising lived experience as a valuable form of knowledge, the next section invites you to reflect on some practice scenarios. These will help you to consider how you can bring together the domains proposed in Barnett’s model in your role as a critical practitioner.