Theory practice and trends in human services an introduction pdf

This easy-to-understand text addresses critical topics in human services to provide you with a comprehensive overview of the field. Major content areas include professional issues, standards in the profession skill standards, ethics, accreditation, and credentialing , history, counseling theory, helping skills, human development, group and family counseling, community systems, consultation and supervision, and research, testing, and evaluation.

The last chapter on career development gives you an opportunity to examine whether human services is the right field for you and helps you understand the career counseling process.

The book is further distinguished by its experiential emphasis, unique use of personal vignettes, and focus on the development of the helper. Edward S. Ed Neukrug has made a substantial impact on the fields of counseling and human services.

An author of 11 books and dozens of articles and chapters in books, his works have been read by thousands of counseling and human services students and professionals. In short, we cannot learn from experience unless we actually think about that experience, and thereby make sense of it. This, in turn, sets the scene for the third stage, that of abstract conceptualization. The experience can be linked to other experiences, beliefs and attitudes and thus integrated into one's overall life experience.

This entails considering the implications of the concrete experience and evaluating its relevance and validity. This is the point at which the new learning is tried out in practice, when learning at an abstract level is translated into the concrete reality of practice. And so the process continues. Implicit within this model is a perspective on the relationship between theory and practice.

This perspective can be described in terms of the following propositions: 1. Learning does not happen automatically as a result of experience. This is a point to which I shall return in Chapter 2.

Full learning only takes place when the cycle is completed, when learning is put into practice. Acquiring knowledge is only part of the process of learning. Each of us is responsible for our own learning.

Learning is an active and self-directed process and so, ultimately, no one can do our learning for us. He stated that routine action is action guided by impulse, tradition and authority.

The routine prac- titioner takes the everyday realities of practice for granted, e. Before moving on, it is perhaps worth re-emphasizing point 4 above, namely the axiom that the learner is responsible for his or her own learning. As Boud and Walker 62 comment: There is potential for learning in every situation and it is up to the learner to realise this potential.

It is the learner's interaction with the learning milieu which creates the particular learning experi- ence. While facilitators, and others, can create the milieu, it is the learner who creates the experience. The same logic can be applied to the use of theory in practice. This provides opportunities for learning doing enhances thinking but also creates opportunities for using theoretical and other knowledge as a framework for under- standing and a guide to action thinking enhances doing.

But, as Boud and Walker imply, the milieu provides opportunities but these opportunities do not, of themselves, produce learning. Similarly, opportunities for putting theory into practice do not automatically produce theory-based practice. Practitioners have a responsibility for converting those opportunities into an enhanced level of practice.

Professionalism One of the recognized hallmarks of a profession is an underlying knowledge base, a body of specialist knowledge which acts as the basis of professional expertise Sibeon This is particularly the case with nursing, due in no small part to the desire to establish it as a profession allied to, but also distinct from, the medical profession.

This drive towards a distinctive theory base is not so evident in social work and social care, although this is not to say that it does not exist.

This difference between the two professional groups can be explained, partly at least, by reference to two factors: 1. Nursing is closely associated with medicine, both historically and practically. Social work, by contrast, is not so closely associated with medicine, and so the need to be seen as separate has not been so acutely felt. Preston-Shoot and Agass 5 argue that: Social workers have an ambivalent relationship with theory. Uncertain of its relevance, social workers lack an adequate theoretical and conceptual base for purposeful practice.

Theorising is abandoned to academics. Theory and practice: thinking and doing 9 On both counts, then, theory is located within the broader context of aspirations to professionalism. Organizations re- sponsible for the education and training of staff also place emphasis on the importance of relating theory to practice as a component of professional credibility.

Because of this important set of interconnections, the question of profession- alism is one to which we shall return later. Indeed, it is only since the late s that the issues of sexism, racism and so on have begun to make an impact on the social policy agenda in Britain. Now, however, changes are beginning to be made. An important implication of this that the process of integrating theory and practice must take on board, as a central concern, is a commitment to challenging discrimination and oppression.

That is, the task is also one of relating anti-discriminatory theory to practice. Indeed, we could say that the primary task is that of using theory to develop anti-discriminatory practice, for as I have argued previously, good practice must be anti-discriminatory practice:.

For example,. Her relatives were very impressed with the standard of nursing care in the home and therefore made no connection between the nursing care provided and Indira's deteriorating condition. However, on one particular visit, Indira's daughter noticed an uneaten meal on a tray next to her mother's bed. Further investigation revealed that no allowance had been made for her mother's cultural preferences with regard to food or other aspects of daily living. Despite nursing standards being high in other respects, this lack of sensitivity to ethnic needs had produced a racist outcome.

In order to understand how and why this is important, I shall present examples relating to four particular forms of discrimination. Practice Focus illustrations 1.

Practice Focus 1. She was very impressed with the high standards of practice in the team and the high level of commitment. However, after returning to college for a day's workshop on gender awareness, she found herself with something of a dilemma.

The workshop had drawn her attention to the way in which forms of practice which do not show a sensitivity to gender issues can so easily, and unwittingly, reinforce oppressive and destructive gender stereotypes. Depressed men were being encouraged to overcome their depression by pursuing what she had now come to recognize as typically masculine activities such as work and sport.

The possibility that gender role restrictions and sexism were part of the problems leading to depression was one that had not been explored or even considered. The problem was not one of malice but, rather, one of misguided kindness. The effect of this had been to create an ethos of dependency in which weaknesses were emphasized, rather than strengths enhanced and reinforced. In effect, this approach was based on ageist stereotypes of frailty and dependency.

Theory and practice: thinking and doing 13 Disablism has much in common with ageism in so far as they both focus on weakness and both marginalize groups of people on the basis of stereotypical misconceptions.

Disablism involves seeing people with a physical impairment as objects of pity who are not able to participate in mainstream society Oliver ; Oliver and Sapey Oliver 15 Practice Focus 1. In order to gain broad representation, staff from the health service and local voluntary agencies were invited to contribute. At one level, this proved to be a success and resulted in a high level of effective multidisciplinary collaboration.

However, at another level, the whole exercise proved to be a complete failure. The planning group was only able to provide a professional perspective and took no account of the perspective of disabled people themselves. Oliver is critical of this individualistic model of disability as it over- emphasizes the assumed personal costs of disability and under-empha- sizes the social and political costs of disability which marginalize disabled people.

The problems inherent in this traditional individual- istic approach illustrate two important points, indeed two central themes of this book: 1. Good practice must be anti-discriminatory practice.

An approach to human services work which is not sensitive to issues of discrimi- nation and oppression runs the risk of doing more harm than good and is therefore extremely dangerous.

Practice needs to be based on theory. Good practice therefore needs to be informed by theoretical understanding. The four examples given here raise a number of important issues, some of which will be addressed in ensuing chapters.

We should also note that the four areas of discrimination outlined here are not the only ones that need to be taken into consideration. Issues of sexual identity, language, nationality, region and so on are also important considerations. For example, middle- class workers may feel more comfortable in dealing with service users of a similar class background.

There is therefore considerable scope for discrimination, intended or otherwise, and so there is a need for sensitivity to issues of class. It is also important to recognize that discrimination extends far beyond the main categories of class, race, gender and so on.

Many groups of people can experience discrimination in certain circum- stances. This exclusion and devaluing may be understood contextually by examining western cultural values which tend to idealise youth, productiv- ity and success. The concept of discrimination therefore needs to be seen in its widest sense, rather than restricted to the most well-established forms. Power, ideology and values These are three important concepts as far as relating theory to practice is concerned.

I shall consider each of them in turn before addressing the question of how, in combination, they affect the relationship between theory and practice. The centrality of power in professional work has been increasingly recognised Wilding, ; Cousins, , yet the interconnection of power and caring work in health and welfare provision has been relatively unexplored.

That is, theory is predominantly generated by dominant groups in society. Conse- quently, the theory base which informs and guides such practice will also have power implications. Ideology The concept of ideology challenges and undermines the simplistic notion that an objective understanding of the world is possible.

Ideology shows that some degree of subjective interpretation is inevitable. Such ideas do not occur, in social thought, one by one, in an isolated form.

They contract links between one another. Without these frameworks, we could not make sense of the world at all. But with them, our perceptions are inevitably structured in a particular direction by the very concepts we are using. What this passage indicates is that a totally objective theory is not possible. This has important implications for the integration of theory and practice, and so it is a point to which I shall return below.

Values Our interactions with one another and with the world are not neutral or value-free. Our values are those things that are important to us, those that we hold dear. Indeed, rights are very much part of the value base of human services. The relationship between theory and practice therefore needs to be seen in the context of values.

This will be a key issue in the discussion of philosophy in Chapter 4. What they have in common, of course, is that they are political factors. It belongs to a world of which they do not feel, nor want to be, part. Politics is for others. Politics is a deviant activity in which no self-respecting professional should indulge. Politics, moreover, would wither away if only everything could be discussed and decided on a civilised basis.

I shall therefore address it more fully in Chapter 5. Griseri argues that values are deeply held and are resistant to change because they matter.

That is, they are important enough for us to maintain them even in the face of pressure to change them:. A change in ethics does not, cannot, happen on its own, but must inevitably affect many other elements.

Hence the sheer inertia of these means that we hold tenaciously to our values. If one were not so tenacious, one might question how far their ethical views were genuinely held at all. The value of research Research is an important process through which formal knowledge is developed. It is helpful in two ways, positive and negative. In the negative sense, research can also help us move forward by revealing fallacies and false assumptions.

Many things are taken for granted and assumed to be true but do not stand up to rigorous scrutiny when the spotlight of a research study is trained upon them.