Vulnerabilidad de la población a inundaciones y sequías

Teaching social work students about ethical practice didactically and by example continues to be crucial in the education of professional social workers

Congress, 2002

The literature across various human sciences clearly shows that ethics education and training are of great importance in preparing students for ethical practice. As Kohlberg (1981) stated, education is crucial to developing and promoting a person’s ethical awareness. In human service professions like social work, the knowledge and integration of professional values and ethics is achieved through education and practice experience. That is, values and ethics are usually formally

taught in the classroom and then applied and developed in actual practice, as discussed in 2.7.1.

Generally speaking, through the teaching of values and ethics, students start to become familiar with their professional value system and prepared to become ethical social workers. Reamer (2001) claims social work values must be at the centre of social work education, while Hugman (2005:162) states that ‘if ethics is not included in professional education then practitioners learn that it is not important’.

Social work as a value-laden profession acknowledged early-on the necessity for values and ethics teaching and learning. Historically, the literature on the teaching of values and ethics in social work dates back to the work of the American social work educator, Muriel Pumphrey in 1959 (Congress, 2002), followed by Reamer and Abramson’s (1982) book on the teaching of social work ethics (McAuliffe and Ferman, 2002). Today, the value of teaching ethics in social work has been widely acknowledged by the international social work community (International Federation of Social Workers & International Association of Schools of Social Work), and the global values statement (discussed in 2.3) also includes ethical principles for the education and practical training of social work students.

Drawing upon the work of a range of social work scholars, Walmsley and Birkbeck (2006) identify the following core objectives related to teaching values and ethics within social work education:

a. Provide an awareness of one’s own values;

b. Engender the ability to recognize value conflicts in oneself and between oneself and clients;

c. Provide the ability to distinguish personal from professional values;

d. Ensure a willingness to adopt the profession’s values; e. Provide the inspiration needed for a meaningful career;

f. 6. Give concrete guidelines for actual practice (p.113).

In addition to the above, studies have shown that education and training in ethics has a significant influence on the ability to make ethical decisions, use ethics resources, and the moral actions of students (Grady et al., 2008). Similarly, research has found that students’ who are familiar with social work values and ethics may be more likely to understand ‘the complexity of the situations and the dilemmas that social workers encounter, than those who have not yet started their professional training’ (Landau, 1999:71).

Internationally, there are two dominant models for teaching values and ethics in social work: the discrete model and the pervasive model (Joseph, 1991). The discrete model refers to separate values and ethics courses, while the pervasive model integrates them throughout the curriculum. Some social work scholars, like Reamer (2001) and Congress (2002), contend that the most effective way to teach ethics in social work is to combine the discrete model with the pervasive model. However, the effectiveness of this approach has not yet been empirically evaluated (Berkman et al., 2000).

As regards teaching methods, Reamer (2001) suggests a combination of traditional and modern teaching methods for ethics such as lectures, videos, debates, role- plays, student logs, etc. Reamer (2001) also suggests that ethics is better taught towards the end of the curriculum, because at this stage of studying, students are better prepared to understand and address ethical issues and conflicts. However, in addition to didactic approaches to ethics, Congress (2002) states that, students also learn to act ethically through role modelling (see also Chapter 3.8). As she puts it:

Ethical behaviour is also learnt by students through observing their teachers, either in the classroom or in their practice, as role models and they therefore have a responsibility to model appropriate ethical behaviour’(p.153).

In light of the above, there is no doubt that teaching professional values and ethics is considered as a primary task for social work education and as such, it must be an integral part of it. The following quote from Joseph (1991) best summarises the essential goal of teaching ethics and values in social work education:

Importantly, the goal of teaching ethics in professional education is not indoctrination -to teach a special set of behaviours for certain situations - but rather to promote respect for various moral perspectives and help students engage in the dialectic necessary to reach informed ethical choices (p. 98).

2.7.1 Values and Ethics in the Curriculum of the Social Work Department of TEI of Athens/Greece

As discussed earlier, teaching and learning values and ethics for students is important because it helps them to increase their ethical awareness and ethical sensitivity to issues within their profession. For this reason, teaching values and ethics today has become an essential and integral part of most social work curricula worldwide.

From a web search of the curricula of Social Work Departments in Greece, it became clear to the researcher that all Departments of Social Work in the country include aspects of values and ethics teaching in their educational programmes. Yet, because social work degree programmes throughout Greece are different in structure and content, ethics education is tailored to each individual Social Work Department. As a result, there is variation in the content of ethics courses, as well as the teaching methods used for them. Within this framework, the Social Work Department of Athens has its own characteristics.

Since its beginnings in 1984, the Social Work Department of Athens has shown a keen interest in ethics teaching to students. For many years, the Department offered a separate course on professional values and ethics. But, at the beginning of the current decade, it stopped providing this module and ethics became integrated

into social work courses throughout the curriculum. This change reflects the pervasive model of teaching ethics as discussed above. However, recent changes in the curriculum have resulted in the reintroduction of a discrete ethics module. The discrete module was designed to give students the opportunity to have direct knowledge about social work values and ethics. This new module is entitled ‘Professional Ethics and Deontology in Social Work’ and runs in the second year of the four year degree programme, before the first block placement (5th _{semester of} studies). The module is compulsory for all students and is taught using a variety of teaching methods such as lectures, discussions, and small group work. It is taught three hours per week for one semester.

The module aims to provide students with basic knowledge of social work values and ethics, as well as to familiarise them with the skills necessary for identifying and addressing ethical issues related to social work practice. The module content includes: the history of values and ethics in social work; the relationship between personal and professional values; the nature of national and international ethical codes in the profession of social work and allied disciplines; ethical issues and obstacles to social work practice; interprofessional collaboration and ethics; the rights of clients to social services; ethics in the use of software programmes in social work services and so forth.

Topics such as ethical theories, as discussed in 2.6, are not included in the course material29_{, though the prescribed literature highlights their importance to students} in order to prepare them to better comprehend the ways that professionals make ethical decisions, as well as to understand their own ways of ethical thinking and acting during their practice placement (Osmo and Landau, 2001, 2006; McAuliffe and Ferman, 2002). As the module does not provide models of ethical decision making in social work practice, neither does it include all the key issues related to

29 _{This information was given after personal contact with the teacher responsible for teaching the}

course (personal communication, September 20, 2010) for further clarification on the course content.

the teaching of values and ethics mentioned earlier and suggested by the international literature on ethics education.

Before concluding this section, it is worth mentioning that, apart from the existing ethics module, students also learn to become aware of their professional values and ethics through other social work courses during their studies. It can be argued that in general, the Department combines the discrete ethics model with the pervasive ethics model for ethics teaching in social work, as discussed in 2.7.