![]() The stories included reflections on a range of things, from major decisions to small gestures. Some rare and welcome positive media coverage about social workers included a collection of short pieces written by people for whom their involvement was life changing ( Hardy, 2015). Social work as a profession also suffers from stigma and blame, amplified through often hostile media reporting ( Warner, 2014). Such ‘thin’ stories ( Morrison, 2009) denigrate and – as recently admitted in a government document – ‘obscure’ the identities and capabilities of real people ( MHCLG, 2019, p. Stigmatising and limiting discourses about people who might use social work services saturate the media and surface in practice policies and procedures ( Fenton, 2016), casting people as ‘troubled’, ‘challenging’, ‘mad’, ‘risky’, ‘illegal’ and so on ( Harragan et al., 2018 Wills et al., 2016). ![]() ![]() The people social work serves are still often regarded as somehow less than human. The polarising debates about social work as either art or science ( Cornish, 2017) are perhaps one reason, but there is also the issue of what social work represents in society. Main article textĪt a time when the benefits of general practitioners prescribing art classes are being taken seriously ( Redmond et al., 2018), creativity and the arts can still feel like an uncomfortable fit with social work. This small example of creative practice is considered as part of a wider reflection on the value of a rich curriculum for social work education, holding out hope for humane practice in challenging times. This process invited students to develop critical and ethical perspectives through thinking about what had struck them, what they had understood differently about the service user groups, what resonated with them personally, and how this might affect their practice. After putting together short stories or accounts of their own, based on their journaling, students were invited to share these in a type of ‘reflecting team’ with peers. Drawing on narrative ideas, students reflected on portrayals of people that were ‘thin’ – labelling and oppressive – and ‘thick’ – revealing a richer picture of people’s lives, needs and capabilities. Informed by an approach used with nursing students in Australia, social work undergraduates in London (England) were encouraged to engage with a range of creative media (newspapers, films, television, plays, social media) and journal about what they noticed. This practice paper draws on ideas from social pedagogy to reflect on the benefits of a creative attempt to connect heads and hearts in the academy. ![]() The influence of managerialism compounds this problem, with space for thinking and feeling continually under pressure. The stories and identities of people who use social work services are often obscured by mass media stereotypes and labels – ‘failed asylum seekers’, ‘scroungers’, ‘troubled families’. ![]()
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