Paper short abstract:

In contexts of austerity the education of students in social care disciplines becomes a more explicitly political project. The project described in this presentation emerges from the belief that arts-informed approaches hold vital possibilities for supporting students’ complex ‘response-abilities.’

Paper long abstract:

The past two decades have witnessed a profound challenge to social and community service disciplines. Cost efficiency and other narrowly-defined accountabilities have become key targets in public services and quantified, standardized and evidence-based procedures are more and more in demand. There is pressure in this context for educators to approach complex social processes as mere tasks, and to educate students to meet check-box, behaviourally-defined competencies. Many progressive educators are seeking ways to support students' abilities to evade and resist the narrowing of social work practice.

Over several months our research team worked with a group of women who have experienced homelessness and who are advocates for themselves and other women. The women participated in storytelling and image theatre exercises that formed the basis of a 20-minute dramatic vignette centered on their interactions with social service providers. The creative process was designed to value the knowledge carried in personal stories of lived experience, while harnessing the power of the arts to evade some of the problematics of personal storytelling in public spaces.

In this presentation we reflect on comments from entry-level social work students who witnessed the performance and offer our analysis of their responses in relation to specific features of the drama. In a discursive context that either rejects public services or makes workers responsible for the bureaucratic management and discipline of 'others,' we consider the potential of projects like this one for calling students into vivid apprehension of their place in relations of power.