Those of us involved in the movement for Palestinian rights are very used to the twists and turns of the Israeli state and its accomplices abroad. They act together to silence and smear the movement for the liberation of Palestine. The Israelis refer to this as hasbara or advocacy for Israel. In reality, hasbara consists of well-funded campaigns of misinformation that work to delegitimise and demonise any criticism of the seemingly endless military occupation of Palestinian land. Israel even has an army of social media trolls that can be mustered at a moments notice to intervene in any social media critique of the Israeli state. False allegations of antisemitism are usually enough to chill the debate.
Tag: social work education
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Kotahitanga
A Guest post by Zoe Holly – Ngāti Pikiao and Ngāti Pākehā – Final year Bachelor of Social Practice student – Unitec.
I have read through the comments left underneath several recent news articles with a heavy heart – particularly in relation to Anjum Rahman’s call for inclusivity of Muslim communities in Aotearoa, Oranga Tamariki listing Māori children on TRADEME/Seek for foster care and the Christchurch gunman pleading not guilty to the murder of 51 innocent people.
The overwhelming sentiment held by a majority of those commenting on these articles is that the people who are targeted need to ‘get over it’, ‘blend in’, ‘assimilate’ and change themselves to fit “New Zealand’s culture”. You’d think they’d never thought for themselves. Does the word colonisation mean anything to them? You think when British settlers came to New Zealand they ‘assimilated’? You think settlers tried to ‘blend in’ even remotely? You think New Zealand Pākehā have more of a right to be here than any other immigrant?
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Let’s do this…. Eventually?
A guest post by John Darroch, PhD student , University of Auckland
This week the current Labour Government unveiled their first budget. The budget was a lot better than it could have been, and it’s a welcome relief to have a government which actually cares about people and demonstrates this in its spending. Despite this there have been some glaring omissions in the budget. I believe that we can, and should, do better.
This is the third and final blog post in response to the New Zealand Social Workers Registration Board’s (SWRB) current review of their standards for recognising programmes of social work professional education. In the first blog post I discussed the question of whether required curriculum inputs should be specified in the standards and argued that an emphasis on inputs and content specification in other jurisdictions stifled innovation, overloaded the curriculum and led to students feeling pressured by the sheer amount of content to be covered. I went on to argue that, if we want to improve social work education programmes in Aotearoa New Zealand, then we must focus on the outcomes of qualifying programmes, not curriculum inputs. The second blog post responded to the question of the adequacy of the graduate attributes specified in the standards and argued that, instead of having a set of 14 graduate outcomes, in addition to a set of 10 core competence standards, we ought to articulate a single set of clear, unambiguous and realistic statements of intended graduate outcomes, competencies or capabilities. Furthermore, I argued that we could obtain clarity about the correct level of achievement for new graduates if we adopted a whole of career approach and specify the outcomes we expect at different points in the career journey of a social worker. I also pointed out that the enhance R2P project is national research project funded by Ako Aotearoa to address precisely this issue.
In a previous blog post I discussed the current review by the New Zealand Social Workers Registration Board (SWRB) of its programme recognition standards. Since the programme recognition standards are what the SWRB use to recognise and (every five years) re-recognise a social work qualifying programme, any changes introduced as a result of the review would, in effect, reform social work education in Aotearoa New Zealand. A consultant has circulated a survey amongst stakeholders to invite comment on the existing standards (SWRB, 2013) including: the graduate profile, the curriculum, requirements for fieldwork placement, admission criteria, modes of delivery, and staffing requirements. In my last post I discussed curriculum content and argued that specifying required curriculum content would hinder rather than help curriculum improvement. Instead, I argued that the focus of our attention ought not to be on curriculum inputs but on clarifying the outcomes of qualifying education. In this post I want to continue with that argument, reflect on the survey questions about the graduate profile, and consider what an effective, outcomes-based social work education might look like.