See what I mean: Using photography to find ways of making reflective practice accessible to student social workers

The following is a discussion and explanation of an attempt to break through the difficulties some students have in talking in new ways about their experience as student social workers. The ability to be critically reflective about one’s work is a key skill in social work and is seen to be a way to avoid routine procedural practice which can tend to lead one to not see people as individuals but rather as “cases” to be fitted into a system of services available. However, “being reflective” in any real and meaningful sense can be hard in the extreme and trying to find ways of thinking about the work one has done and the impact on the service user and one’s own part in that work can become reduced to formulaic routine where one asks the same questions about the work and the style we use can become tired and just as uncritical as unanalysed work.

Using disposable cameras as a way of getting the students to try to look at their world in a different way was felt to be an interesting method of moving away from the constraints of the written and spoken word and potentially offered a new and unusual (for social work students) way of seeing the world around them.

Key words: reflection, photography, disjuncture, scaffolding.