I would like to welcome you all this afternoon.
My name is Cindy Forehand.
I'm the Dean of the graduate College,
for those that don't know me
and I am pleased to welcome you to the second
of our four university scholar presentations for this year.
This is our 42nd year
of the Academic University Scholar program.
So it's a a wonderful tradition to have these lectures.
If you haven't eaten all the food already waiting for us,
please feel free to get up and do that at any point.
So the University Scholar Award recognizes our faculty
for outstanding and sustained excellence in research,
scholarship, and the creative arts.
Today we recognize Professor Jan Fook
who is professor and chair in the department of Social Work.
Dr. Fook received her MSW from the University of Sydney
and her PhD from the University of Southampton in the UK.
She's an elected fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences
in the UK and has held nine international
professorial appointments including
at the University of Southampton
and the University of London.
Among her past appointments have been professorial posts
in both social work and in education.
Dr. Fook has traveled extensively delivering lectures
and workshops across Europe, Asia, and North America.
She's most well known for her work on critical social work,
practice research, interprofessional working,
and critical reflection.
She was formally director
of the Center for Professional Development
at Latrobe University in Australia,
head of the division of Social Work Studies
at the University of Southampton,
director of the school of Social work
at Dalhousie University in Canada
and director of the Interprofessional Institute
at Southwest Academic Network in London.
Immediately before coming to Vermont,
professor Fook was consultant in continuing education
into the Southwest London Teaching Partnership.
She has published 18 books as author or editor
and over a hundred book chapters in journal articles.
Her most recent books include Practicing Critical Reflection
in Social Care Organization from Rutledge Press,
Learning and Critical Reflection,
Experiences of Transformative Learning, also from Rutledge,
and a fourth edition
of Social Work, a Critical Approach to Practice
from Sage has just been published
and a manuscript entitled
Academic Practice and Transformative Social Work
is in Press.
There is much more we could say about her accomplishments,
but we like to share lighter information
at these introductions as well.
So we've learned some interesting things
about professor Fook
including that she has continuously owned dogs
since she was 10 years old and now owns two rough collies,
which I'm told are Lassie dogs.
For those of you doesn't know what a rough collie is.
Their names are Buzz and Dixie.
This love of animals likely explains the fact
that she has co-edited three popular books
about women and their animal companions,
A Girl's Best Friend, Cat Tails, and Horse Streams.
As if these were not enough side interests,
Jan's also an award-winning tapestry artist,
an accomplished pianist and a passionate rose cultivator
though currently roseless.
And with that I'm pleased to introduce Professor Fook
for her inaugural university scholar lecture
titled An Accidental Academic Career
Finding and Sustaining Meaning.
At the conclusion of the talk,
if it's not six o'clock
with all of our issues getting started,
she'll take questions for about 10 minutes.
Thank you.
(audience clapping)
Thank you so much Dean Forehand.
I don't know who you got those fun facts from.
[Cindy Forehand] It's a secret.
I'm now very sorry
because I did want to start the talk with photos
of Buzz and Dixie and I could've obviously,
but it's gonna start slightly more seriously
and we can talk about dogs later.
So, and I have to show you this,
I have, I'm going to read this,
but it's so big because I did try reading something
when we had the celebration for the award of this
and I couldn't read it.
So I've learned.
It's called learning from experience,
which you're gonna find out more about later.
An Accidental Academic Career.
It is a truth universally acknowledged
that making decisions about one's life path
may not be straightforward.
This is especially the case for someone of my background
and racial and cultural heritage,
although it did not seem so at the beginning of my career.
As a child of migrants,
it was always understood that I should attend university.
The choice of what I should study
was clearly determined not by me but by my mother no less.
I studied social work because a social worker
is what my mother always wanted to be.
And as a young third generation Australian born Chinese
lower middle class woman born in the 1950s,
this choice did not seem so unreasonable,
as apparently the only other choices for people like me
at the time were nursing or teaching.
Actually I'd always wanted to be a teacher
from a very young age.
My reasons were not so high minded.
I think I just found home life was pretty boring
and school seemed relatively exciting.
That can tell you how boring my home life was.
Unfortunately, I was very ambivalent
about social work study.
I just have to make an apology
to all the social work students here now for saying that.
I think I might have said it to some of you already anyway.
So I didn't find it was very interesting
or intellectually challenging
and my most exciting memory
is of starting a community garden
in a down at hill area in inner city Sydney.
The resident sex workers
and people without addiction issues,
all who really liked me,
obligingly kept watch over the garden during the day.
Not surprisingly, I did not get very good grades
in my social work degree.
And so my barely articulated dream at the time
of possibly going on to postgraduate study
and a career as a university academic,
I assumed was out of the question.
So I began work as a social work practitioner,
but I didn't find much fulfillment.
I think now that if I'd stayed in social work practice,
I probably would've ended up like some of my colleagues
that I knew running a stall at a flea market,
which I'm still interested in doing by the way.
However, fortuitously a lecturing position came up
at the local college and my canine partner
actually urged me to apply.
He's very good at urging me to apply for jobs.
I have to say.
Well it goes without saying that I took to the work
like a duck to water, to coin a well worn cliche.
I clearly recall being totally unfazed
by teaching policemen who couldn't get over my last name
sounding like a very common Australian swear word
and the local butcher who also happened to be a student
who asked in my first class
what could I possibly know about welfare.
And I hope he was referring to my youthful looks
and not my intellect.
But none of this put me off.
So began a pathway which still seems to me to be accidental.
I reveled in being able
to undertake my own independent research
and I soon became intoxicated by the idea
that I could make a difference
simply through researching topics,
which involved a glaring gap or a misconception
in current thinking.
For me at the time,
this major misconception became very apparent
partly due to the nature of the coursework
that I undertook in my postgraduate study.
This was in the early 1980s in Australia
and it was very fashionable, at least in Australia,
to pour strident critiques
over individualized therapeutic work
and to imperiously proclaim that all problems,
personal and social were due to flaws in the social system.
I saw my all white sociologists male lecturers
propounding this philosophy loudly and controvertible
to our less white female social worker students.
Many disparities were obvious.
So whilst I totally agreed with this basic premise
of structural causes of problems and I still do,
I could not help but think there must be more to the story.
Surely there was still a need to help those hapless victims
of the flawed social system.
Didn't we still need bandaids
whilst also stopping more wounds from being inflicted?
So I embarked on an ambitious project,
which was to write a new model for social work practice
with individual people,
which was based on a structural analysis of social problems.
I felt that people could be more effectively helped
by addressing their immediate concerns
and at the same time not blaming them as individual victims.
Resisting the blame, made sure that people
did not suffer added stigma
and this kind of stance also aimed
to locate an understanding of their experiences
in the social system as well.
I published that work called Radical Casework.
Well I did, this was the second one.
I've obviously missed a PowerPoint.
So this is the entertaining part of the evening
where you see that the PowerPoints won't match
what I'm talking about.
So I did publish a work called Radical Casework.
That was my first work.
This is the second book which I will refer to in a minute.
So Radical Casework was actually subsequently hailed
as one of the most influential social work books
for several decades and some years later
I updated the approach
and wrote another social work practice textbook
based on critical approaches.
So that's it there.
Excuse my photography, it's not the best.
Alan did inform me that that was okay.
So he can be blamed.
So this approach which has gone into its four editions,
as you can see, it takes a critical understanding of power
and power relations incorporating post-modern thinking
and applies these ideas
to social work practice more broadly.
And I use the term critical here
primarily to refer to an understanding
of how power relations and therefore
how inequitable power arrangements are created
and sustained at both personal and social levels.
This type of analysis acts as a basis for social change
along more equitable lines and so it can be transformative.
So this book is still in print after a fourth edition
as you see and it's after more than 20 years.
I do confess I've not been very rigorous
in updating it after 20 years, but there it is.
It's seen as a classic these days.
So I'm hoping I'm making a sideline contribution
with keeping that going.
What I learned from both
before and after creating these works
was that people needed help
to actually translate broader theories
into concrete practices.
Analysis did not automatically translate into practice
and this was the genesis of my questioning
of the relationship between theory and practice
and my querying of how and why we tended
to privilege theory over practice or vice versa.
This again seemed too simplistic
and this theme was to underlay much of my subsequent work.
Meanwhile, I was becoming a little more familiar
with academic culture in social work.
I came relatively late to feminism,
but I do remember questioning quite often
why as a women's profession we seem
to be aping the ways of the elite men's professions.
Now this came forcibly to mind for me
when a female colleague, she wanting to undertake
some PhD research was advised
by the older white male professor
not to research field education
as this was not important in his opinion.
I still feel my heckles rising as I think about this.
It was many years ago,
but it still gets me going 'cause most of us
in professional education know
that is often field education
which is the most memorable and most formative part
of the education experience.
I became increasingly aware of how much
of what we took for granted
about how to act professionally
and about what was seen as appropriate knowledge
and ways of developing it was gender biased
and less relevant for a woman's profession.
I particularly started to think about
what was a sort of research which would be most valuable
and relevant to the social work profession.
And in this way I developed the concept
of practice research.
Now this will be interesting.
Let's see what comes up.
Let's just make sure that you're watching you know.
Let's see what happens with there.
Here you go.
We're back on track.
So the concept of practice research
is an approach to research
which identifies those four things.
So basically it's focusing on problems
which are identified through practice
and which uses relevant methods to do so.
And this is not about discounting
or privileging any methods or approaches or even people,
but rather asks researchers, whoever they are,
whether they're service users, practitioners, academics
or policy makers to think through
what methods are most relevant
to study the practice phenomenon at hand.
A practice research approach
is mindful of matching methods to research problems
rather than unthinkingly using a particular method
or approach because it is most popular.
The approach also helps produce research whose findings
are directly applicable to practice.
I'm happy to report
that I organized the first international forum
on this topic back in the UK in 2008
and this group has continued to meet regularly
and to produce statements on practice research since then.
So every two years these statements
are published internationally without me.
So it's kind of nice to feel that you can start things off
and other people run with them.
Anyway, whilst I was developing my thinking
about the importance of practice research,
I realized how very little work there was,
which actually studied social work practice.
I therefore embarked on a large piece of practice research
about professional expertise in social work.
Now let's see what comes up.
Okay,
this was a five year qualitative longitudinal study
which followed a group of 30 social work students
from the beginning of their two year study program
to the end of their first three years of practice.
We also included a group of 30 experienced social workers
who were nominated as experts by their colleagues.
I always have a laugh when I say this
because it was the first time I'd ever done a study
where everybody who was approached agreed to be involved
fancying themselves happily as experts, I guess.
This study was published in the year 2000
and was entitled Professional Expertise Practice Theory
and Education for Working in Uncertainty.
Yay.
It's one of the long longest subtitles in history, I think.
This book details what expertise looks like
at different stages of professional development.
It also posits that having experience
is not the same as being expert.
To become expert involves several different components
which are not necessarily developed
through simply amassing years of experience.
So expert professionals need to be able to prioritize
important factors in their work
to be able to create their own theories
from their own practice experience
and derive that from different contexts.
This enables them to transfer their learning
from one context to another.
Ultimately, the expert does not operate
from learning that's imposed top down,
but is able to think and act creatively
outside the routine.
Guess what emerged as the main skill
that was needed to achieve all of these abilities?
JB knows, I know.
I hope some of my students here know that as well
'cause I've kept saying it to them.
So it was at the time
a lesser known skill called reflection.
Simply this involves learning directly from experience,
which we know is John Dewey's concept
and being able to develop one's own practice theory
in the process.
And that's a Donald Schon's concept,
just putting the two together.
Nowadays we might roll our eyes and say
that we take for granted that everyone teaches reflection
and even better we're all good at doing it.
Sorry, not so.
Despite having such wonderful academic leaders
in our educational tradition like John Dewey,
I have found that even here in Vermont
there is a need to be much more intentional
about modeling and teaching reflection.
It comes with a mindset and a set of values
and an ability to create
the appropriate learning environment.
Now taken together these all have the capacity
to bring about transformational learning.
And I am sorry to say that much
of our accepted ways of learning
are limited in modeling this as we tend to work
within greater institutional and cultural environments
over which we have little control,
or in which the pedagogical culture is inherited
and therefore relatively unquestioned.
So over the last 30 years or so,
I've shifted my attention to developing and modeling
critical reflection for use in social work practice
and in professional education more generally.
The reflection is critical when it is both deep
and informed by critical perspectives on power,
which highlight how social inequities
are created and maintained.
I will remember when the power
of critical reflection process almost overwhelmed me.
This involved a social worker
who attended one of the first courses that I designed
in an advanced practice master's degree.
Terry was torn since he worked
in a non-government organizations
whose managers he felt were corrupt.
He really wanted to report on them,
but he didn't know whether he ought to do so.
After he reflected in our class session,
he surprised us all by immediately writing a letter
to the board of governors who investigated the situation
and suspended some of the managers.
Terry felt so empowered that he resigned as you do
and decided to go into trained union work as you do.
I remember being rather shocked by all of this
'cause I had not even anticipated that would be an outcome,
but it made me reflect on and appreciate the power
of having a helpful learning environment
to explore one's thinking and to take a decision
about how to act.
Terry seemed to me to be an example
of a person who was able to act with integrity
in line with his own values.
I remember his attitude of both relief and triumph
when he reported his actions to the class
and I became convinced that understanding more
about how and why a critically reflective process
could function in this way was vital.
Over time I have refined the model of critical reflection
that I teach and informed it with various theories
and specifying more concrete details
about how it can be practiced.
That's the right picture.
And in brief it involves small group dialogue
on examples of practice experience.
The dialogue focuses on uncovering hidden deep assumptions
in the stories of people's experiences.
And through uncovering these assumptions,
a person is able to reexamine the relevance of them.
Usually they discover that their assumptions
are simply taken for granted beliefs,
which are derived from their cultural or social context.
And once they discover this,
they're enabled to make their own reasoned
and transparent choices.
They then make changes to their thinking
and to their practice and then combine these in ways
which seem more relevant to their current situation
or desired values.
But what is most important is the learning environment
which cultivates this process.
I've actually called this non-judgmental or brave space.
I'm not sure if that fits or not.
It's a brave, I'm calling it a brave space now,
which we tend to talk about now as opposed to a safe space.
Because in a brave space people are ready to be vulnerable
and open to hearing other even contradictory perspectives.
The learning space created enables them
to consider interpretations
as they may not have been able to think of by themselves
and some of which may be very threatening
to previously held ideas about identity, for instance.
It is vital that the learning space enables self-learning
rather than hearing other people's views imposed
and it becomes critical when the reflection goes
to some depths in order to bring about
a transformational shift in thinking.
I have to say I've witnessed many moving
and sometimes almost heartbreaking accounts
of people's experiences
and the changes that they make through reflection.
There was a well respected social worker
who cried when remembering the first time
he removed a child from its family over 20 years earlier.
He'd sat with it for 20 years.
He was incidentally one of the people
who was nominated as an expert social worker.
He didn't think he was.
There was also the feminist social worker
who recounted a difficult experience
of working with the local police.
She later reflected and told me that for the first time
she was able to come to terms with her grief
at being abused as a child.
Although this experience never entered the class discussion.
You may be wondering, but critical was never,
critical reflection was never intended
and is not in fact therapy.
But I am humbled that it has had these side effects
for many people.
So although I love teaching social work,
I finally felt like I was actually doing social work
because seeing people learn and change
before my very eyes
is kind of what I thought social work should be
and the transformative change
which happens through critical reflection
combines all of my earlier discovered challenges.
So that is out of sync, isn't it?
Quite happily.
There you're getting the summary
of the critical reflection process anyway.
Okay, the challenges were being able
to integrate individual and social analysis,
being able to create theory from practice experience,
and being able to do a form of practice research
and something about being able
to combine being a social worker and being a teacher,
which still feels accidental to me,
but there is, I don't know where that fits.
So let's ignore it.
There is still more that seems accidental to me.
I can relatively easily trace the cognitive process
of transformational learning, which takes place.
But what also seems to happen
in the critical reflection process
can't be explained by this.
What happens is that people come to a greater understanding
and acceptance of themselves,
which goes hand in hand with a greater understanding
and acceptance of other people,
especially those who are different from themselves.
I hope I don't need to spell out how important this is,
particularly in this day and age.
The ability to live with social differences,
to carve out compassionate, meaningful,
and fruitful lives in these contexts must surely rate
as being near the top of the list for any engaged citizen.
I remember that when I stumbled
upon the following quote from an old Greek man, Socrates,
and I have to here now just boast
that when I went and taught critical reflection in Greece,
they told me it was Socrates.
So you didn't know that you were gonna learn that
when you came here today.
I actually felt some triumph and relief like Terry
when I discovered this quote from Socrates.
He managed to capture the values and learning culture
of critical reflection when he spoke of,
let's hope this works.
Nope.
We get there in the end.
He spoke of the self-examined life for ethical
and compassionate engagement
with the world and its dilemmas.
And I realized that with critical reflection
I was tapping into something age old,
which made it feel all the more important.
I have some pictures for you at the end,
which are going to capture something
of the whole intellectual and emotional experience
of critical reflection.
So they're before and after shots
of critical reflection.
Now, if any of you ask who that is,
you're not gonna be allowed to come to dinner.
It was a while ago, okay.
I don't, you should be able to work out
what the after shot says.
So it's very good at aging you,
doing critical reflection.
Okay, I'm just gonna go back now
because I wanna look at all how all of this comes together
in my life and as I think back,
I realize very starkly how these same concerns,
the ones I talked about
is the combining the personal and social, et cetera
were very much part of my formative years.
Not many of you know that I was raised
in a fundamentalist Christian background.
I therefore had many identities
which did not fit the mainstream.
My parents actually set up
the first Chinese Seventh Day Adventist church
in Sydney, Australia,
and it was in this small and separatist community
that I spent most of my childhood and teenage years.
We tended to relate only to other people
who were part of that religious community
and we learned to think of ourselves as outsiders,
but as outsiders who nevertheless passed constant judgment
on those who were not part of our community.
We did not drink, smoke, dance or go to the movies,
and you wondered why I'm so boring now.
I have to say Deb and I did lash out
with a cocktail last night, didn't we?
So I'm getting there.
Here I do apologize to anyone in the audience
who may have had a different experience
with such a background,
but I'm just telling you how it influenced
my own consciousness.
Growing up in a small, judgmental, socially narrow community
which cut itself off from the bulk of society
was frankly stifling.
It has given me an underlying fear of and antipathy
towards any cultures or societies
which even if only implicitly demonstrate these principles.
Developing critical reflection
and especially the open learning culture necessary
for expansion and transformation has perhaps been,
I suspect an almost inevitable outcome
of trying to create a new way of being for myself,
which was not like the culture of my upbringing.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons
I have reveled in traveling and working internationally,
trying to both explore myself
and to also understand other countries and cultures
from their own perspectives.
So what's this got to do with now?
Everything I should think.
I constantly wrestle with trying to model a way
of working and relating,
which is based on openness, curiosity,
and non-judgementalism.
I try to understand other people
within their own generational and cultural
and professional contexts.
This is increasingly difficult in a global, national,
and even local environment,
which seems to call on us to do and be less
of all those things.
The polarization of debates seems to go hand in hand
with the readiness to cast judgment.
We seem to need to categorize any different way
of thinking or being from our own
as somehow meaning that they represent people
who belong to groups opposed to our own
or at the very least,
they're people who will not fit with us
or will threaten our culture as we know it.
We can be inclined to do this
on the basis of what may seem to be
the most important criteria,
but are nevertheless only one aspect,
which makes us people.
And I refer here to skin color or gender
or the words people use.
These are stereotyping tendencies
which fill me with dread and also a deep sadness.
They signal to me a culture
which does not look below the surface
and is not open to discovering
very different ways of being,
which may indeed transform the existing culture
into one which is more inclusive.
They indeed signal a culture
to which I feel I do not, cannot,
and do not want to belong.
So how do I sustain the meaning of my own work and career
given these circumstances?
There is something compelling
about the idea of speaking out, which is what I'm doing now.
Even though my early life background as a Chinese woman
raised in a white society did not encourage this,
speaking out is almost always something I have not done.
Being raised to feel that fitting in was the safest,
perhaps the only thing to do as a person of difference.
However, I have reached a point in my career.
I think the saying goes where there is more to look back on
than forward to.
I'm okay with this.
Partly this is because I now appreciate
that the values that I espouse
and which have informed my career contribution
are more important than whatever strange cultural
or historical milieu in which we find ourselves.
And I'm eternally grateful to the academy in many countries,
which has given me a platform and a context
to further these fundamental values
of openness, understanding of difference,
and more expansive ways of being and doing.
My ongoing wish is that all of us students, faculty,
managers, and staff,
can find this fundamental set of values
to set their compasses by and so create more cultures,
microcultures and bigger worlds which are more inclusive
by being curious about and therefore open to difference.
My career started accidentally and each turning point in it
felt like a new discovery,
but these were discoveries
which led me to affirm some important truths.
Perhaps it's a blessing that I never felt like I fitted.
Accepting and understanding those who don't fit
might lead to a workplace and learning culture,
which is not accidental.
But what does it take?
Perhaps we need to review the idea
of the importance of fitting
and how this I idea potentially excludes transformative ways
of being and doing.
How do each of us become more curious
about the experiences of other people
who are different from us,
whether that be because of their role or position
in the university, their social class, their skin color,
their nationality, their age, or their gender.
How do we make our own worlds bigger?
By striving to accept difference
through genuinely curious understanding
rather than through the prism of preconceived categories.
To me, this is the meaning of having a career
in the academy and having the opportunity
to contribute to expanding our worlds.
It is these enduring and fundamental values
which give my and dare I say, our work, meaning.
(audience clapping)