How to be a Social Worker - Priscilla and Tara talk about the new book
Oct 29, 2026 · 31 min · 10 segments
Priscilla and Tara talk about Priscilla's new book - just published - How to be a Social Woerk: Developing your Professional Identity.
Oct 29, 2026 · 31 min · 10 segments
Priscilla and Tara talk about Priscilla's new book - just published - How to be a Social Woerk: Developing your Professional Identity.
yeah and also making the case you know you've often heard me say making the case rather than assuming the case And I think there are assumptions about psychology and social work.
And you have made the case for the sociological condition, the sociological contextual work.
particularly through very careful understandings of primary and secondary socialization.
And this leads to my next question, again, having read it and been so engaged with it, but this is a book, and again, it's weird.
I didn't know you like know you know you when I read the first two editions, but reading this edition, having weekly engagements with you, this is really a book about reflection, I think, And I think the book asks social workers, nay all of us, to look in the mirror and look around them and look around them deeply and see the context in which we're all working.
social work has a really strong history of understanding reflection as being a part of this reflexive process and I'm doing this with my hands because this is how it's conceptualized in the literature around you know is it a spiral or an ongoing sort of thing that we we do something with a client or with the people with whom we work we we go back we reflect we think how could I have done that better or we sort of analyze what theories we might have used and then we think about, anticipate the future in a changed way through that reflection.
I think, you know, it's really important, I think, for social workers to understand that the things that we do are going to be dictated within a context and an environment and a society that has social inequalities embedded in a lot of the institutions in our practices, you know.
And so reflection in that sense helps us change or be accountable to ourselves.
So we're always... you know, intentional in our work, if we're always purposeful, then we should be able to notice the theories that we're utilising and to catch ourselves if we are reproducing these social inequalities because we work in systems that can be oppressive.
We can work in statutory systems, for example, that can be oppressive systems, can have an over-representation of particular communities in them.
And so I think that process of reflection is a fail-safe in some ways to ensure that we're not reproducing inequalities in our practice.
yeah and also making the case you know you've often heard me say making the case rather than assuming the case And I think there are assumptions about psychology and social work.
And you have made the case for the sociological condition, the sociological contextual work.
particularly through very careful understandings of primary and secondary socialization.
And this leads to my next question, again, having read it and been so engaged with it, but this is a book, and again, it's weird.
I didn't know you like know you know you when I read the first two editions, but reading this edition, having weekly engagements with you, this is really a book about reflection, I think, And I think the book asks social workers, nay all of us, to look in the mirror and look around them and look around them deeply and see the context in which we're all working.
social work has a really strong history of understanding reflection as being a part of this reflexive process and I'm doing this with my hands because this is how it's conceptualized in the literature around you know is it a spiral or an ongoing sort of thing that we we do something with a client or with the people with whom we work we we go back we reflect we think how could I have done that better or we sort of analyze what theories we might have used and then we think about, anticipate the future in a changed way through that reflection.
I think, you know, it's really important, I think, for social workers to understand that the things that we do are going to be dictated within a context and an environment and a society that has social inequalities embedded in a lot of the institutions in our practices, you know.
And so reflection in that sense helps us change or be accountable to ourselves.
So we're always... you know, intentional in our work, if we're always purposeful, then we should be able to notice the theories that we're utilising and to catch ourselves if we are reproducing these social inequalities because we work in systems that can be oppressive.
We can work in statutory systems, for example, that can be oppressive systems, can have an over-representation of particular communities in them.
And so I think that process of reflection is a fail-safe in some ways to ensure that we're not reproducing inequalities in our practice.
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