Dr Arlene P Weekes

UWL Social Work Day Conference Black African And African Caribbean Mental Health

22 March 2024 

Conference Opening - Mental Health, Mental Illness, Mental Wellbeing and Resilience

The opening address at the UWL School of Social Work's Social Work Day Conference on Black African and African Caribbean Mental Health, sets out to foster a culture of self-awareness, compassion, and sustainable practice among future social work professionals, ultimately enhancing their ability to effectively support individuals within Black African and African Caribbean communities. 

The opening address underscores the importance for social work students to prioritising their own Mental Health, Mental Illness, Mental Wellbeing, and Resilience. Dr Weekes. recognises the demanding nature of the field and the significance of self-care, the address aims to instil a proactive mindset among conference attendees. Emphasising the interconnectedness of the concepts, the address encourages students to reflect on their own mental health needs, understand the complexities of mental illness within diverse communities, and cultivate strategies to promote their own wellbeing and resilience, by way of physical activities such as yoga and adopting a healthy diet.  

Utilising group dynamics to provide learning opportunities for social work students - UWL Festival of Learning

6 July 2023

Dr Arlene P Weekes & Maureen Mguni

In both teaching institutions and the workplace, group working is proven to be an effective and powerful way to learn. Organisations stress the importance of team working skills, especially in environments where the ability to collaborate with others is crucial, such as working in multidisciplinary teams. No less so than in the field of social work. However, while the practice of social work is fundamentally relational, most students shy away from working with others, despite believing themselves to be naturally accepting and open-minded. Values and beliefs can and do, lead to an individualistic, and often discriminatory, form of professional practice that, in turn, leads to blame and burnout, often due to managing service-users in isolation, due to caseload pressure. Social work needs to move away from such individualistic forms of practice. Collaborative and constructive pedagogical theoretical theories such as Piaget, who argued that behaviours are contingent upon individual interpretation, as well as intergroup contact theory, as described by Allport (1954) and Pettigrew (1969), were used to encourage students to integrate with one another. The presentation evidence from action research that shows how group work can provide a platform from which students can help each other, and act as a basis for integrated, cooperative group action for common ends - namely, constructing knowledge through students’ experiences, can contribute to today’s social work teaching framework. Social work education must re-examine how a profession built around the core principles of empowerment and enablement can move beyond the assumption that individuals have an in-built ability to be non-discriminatory. It must work towards helping students to understand, and actively implement, anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory social work practices. To do so, lecturers need to move pass their own fears of losing control of the class and develop confidence in addressing issues of intersectionality, positionality, equality, and diversity to empowering students to feel confident enough to explore such issues as they arise in the classroom via groupwork.

Effective Personal and Professional Judgement for Panel Members

27 September 2022

Keynote speech

The presentation is based on a six-year study that examined how the personal and professional viewpoints of persons who serve on the adoption and fostering panel affect the work they do and the recommendations they make.

Disparity of experiences of black academics in higher education - JSWEC

15 June 2023

Dr Vida Douglas, Dr Arlene P Weekes, Dr. Bridget Ng'andu, Mthoko Ngobese, Shantelle Thomas, Kwanele Shishane and Silibaziso Siliba Sibanda

Anti-racist social work and the role of education, research and practice

15 June 2023

Dr Arlene P Weekes, Rita Jacobs, Cromwell Takunda Mutsinze and Chelsie-Marie Frame

Using Inter-group contact theory in the classroom to socialise and educate social work students

23 June 2022

Conference paper

Discrimination and marginalisation remain major issues in social work today and in the wider society. The attitudes of individuals have been completely permeated by segregation, ignorance and prejudice. Rodenborg and Boisen (2013), describe that aversive racism is still a pervasive element of personal and professional judgment but can be overcome by improving the teaching environment, which significantly improves the situation. Research shows that by improving the teaching environment, students deepen their self-awareness and develop ‘other' knowledge. Outside the classroom, those in majority groups benefit by learning about the groups they do not belong to (Jackman and Crane, 1986; Tropp and Pettigrew, 2005; Dixon et al., 2005; Brown et al., 2019).

This presentation describes how module design and different teaching strategies can maximise student confidence, engagement and learning. This can happen by encouraging the development of emotional intelligence, critical reflection and practice of social skills. The discussion focuses on the work of Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1998; Strayhorn and Johnson, 2014. The work of Gray et al. (2013), whas also been discussed on identifying practices that academicians can use to evolve and actively understand and implement their teaching strategies. Another work that this discussion is based on is by Strayhorn (2015) about reclaiming indigenous beliefs and helping students understand anti-oppressive and anti-discriminatory social work practices.

Child Q – How can African and Caribbean children be safeguarded?

20 June 2022

Conference paper

Facing the challenge of belief and value drive decision-making. 
 
London South Bank University (LSBU) are proud to deliver what promises to be a safeguarding conference with a difference. Usually, discussions about safeguarding focus on the harm caused to children by their parents or guardians. However, for Child Q, the harm caused to her involved professionals, those in loco parentis, who were tasked to protect. Instead, they caused her physical, emotional and sexual harm.

Despite the outcrying of those from African and Caribbean descent over decades, about the overt and subtle forms of racism they and their children experience at the hands of individuals and institutions, their voices have often not been truly heard. All too often silenced by platitudes of unconscious bias and projections that blame the victims rather than the perpetrators of racist practices.

This conference aims to provide an opportunity for African and Caribbean professionals from education, health, the police and social work – to offer an alternative perspective to the problem, and to share ideas for how the institutions that African and Caribbean children and young people attend when they leave the sanctity of their own homes should protect, nurture and develop them.

The conference is open to all with an interest & passion in this area - parents, social workers, social work students, designated school safeguarding leads, designated health safeguarding leads (hospitals and community), police, etc.

Prejudice & Psychometrics: Combatting our assumptions

2022-06-11

Keynote speaker

This keynote speech will be visceral, aimed at discovering deeper feelings instead of merely focusing on the intellect, what is felt and experienced. In order to focus on issues of discrimination, prejudice, values, thinking and beliefs.

Postdoctoral Narrative - Life After Passing

26 June 2022

Conference poster

A study of the biographic and professional influences on fostering/adoption panels members' recommendation-making

3 February 2022

Conference poster

Teaching strategy: the key to maximising personal and professional outcomes

2022-01-18

Conference poster

Today, the challenge of meeting the needs of an increasing diverse student population is harder than ever. Yet, unless this challenge is met, teaching institutions are likely to fail in their objectives of maximising engagement, and producing personally fulfilled and professionally effective social workers.

The challenge is teaching strategy. This must not only fulfil the primary purpose of preparing students for the workplace, but must encourage students to understand the intrinsic value of learning: to see its benefits from a wider personal and professional perspective. Such a strategy must help students understand that they are not passive ‘objects’ of the teaching process, but can play an active role in their own development, by engaging fully with the process and their fellow students, and by being constructively critical of the conventional teaching paradigm. To help facilitate this understanding, the teaching community needs to recognise that many students – especially those who are financially or emotionally challenged - see their course in purely pragmatic terms: as a way out. They come to the learning table with a ‘just tell me what I need to know to pass’ attitude. A mutually respectful and trusting relationship is needed to help counteract this attitude and produce optimum outcomes for all stakeholders.

This presentation highlights how module design, and adopting different approaches and strategies to teaching, can help maximise student engagement, participation and positive professional outcomes by encouraging the development of emotional intelligence, critical reflection and practical social skills.

Explore the thinking behind the current module designing and to hear from a group of students how they have experienced the module and how it compares to their previous experience of learning and other virtual modules, as well as the plans for future research into the subject.