Blurring the boundaries: a collaborative approach to language and learning support for social work students
Victoria University in melbourne, australia attracts students
with diverse histories and cultural backgrounds. Academic
staff of the Social Work Unit have a long history of working
with staff from learning Support Services to assist
students to develop their academic skills. In 2011, social
work and learning support staff have worked together to
develop a new collaborative approach to learning support,
characterised by an ‘outreach’ approach of bringing highly
contextualised learning support to the students in their
social work course, rather than trying to encourage the
students to attend separate learning support services. This
new approach blurs the boundaries between the disciplinespecific
teaching and the learning support. It was stimulated
by the University’s pilot of a language literacy and numeracy
(lln) strategy. Underpinning this approach is the idea that
all students are being apprenticed into a new discursive
space. Situated and explicit lln support is the focus, and
staff approach lln in developmental rather than deficit
terms. This paper describes the outreach approach and
explores what made this collaborative approach possible.
Some of the factors identified include shared commitment
to a student-centred approach that works with strengths
rather than deficits, and the compatibility of the critical
social work approach of the social work staff with the
critical literacy approach of the learning support staff.