An Innovative Project to Enhance Students' Understanding on Social Work through Discovering the Quality of Social Workers from Service Users' Perspective

Abstract

This is an innovative project to help social work students of the Department of Applied Social studies and the incoming new students of the College of Liberal and Social Sciences understand social work through involving them to discover the qualities of social workers from service users' perspective. Service users will be firstly invited to sharing seminars to inspire students' concern with the importance of discovering service users' views. Students will then be trained and assigned to conduct an in-depth qualitative interview with service users on their experiences in the helping process with the social workers and what they fmd the important qualities of social workers from these experiences. Students will work together to use the interview data to produce a script and work with the professional production team for making a 30-minute digital movie about the quality of social workers based on the service users' perspective. A public seminar or conference will be organised by the students to present the movie and raise the awareness of the social work professional community about the service users' perspective on the quality of social workers. The movie will be used by teachers in social work courses and will be put on Departmental website.