• by Siobhan Maclean
• 15th Jul 2020

Drawing social work journeys

The last image of the week introduced the Wednesday Webinars with the student connect team. These are going really well. We have now had 5 webinars and it is great to see the same people coming back each week, it feels as though we are beginning to develop a virtual community of practice. Our last session focused on reflective supervision. I introduced the ‘journey model’ explaining that supervision is the passport to any social work journey.

Over the last few weeks, I have developed the PowerPoints that I use for the sessions, asking my daughter Rosie to draw some images for the slides. A few people had asked in the chat about who did the drawings and so we decided to ask Rosie to attend the webinar live and capture what people shared about their journeys in illustrations. At the start of the session we asked participants how they would describe their social work journey at the moment and Rosie drew and shared some images at the end of the session.

I believe there is great value in visual thinking for social work and have been exploring research around visualisation in cognitive neuroscience, which suggests that “language is for communication not thought” (Passingham 2016:64) with thought being based on visual thinking. Certainly, lots of people attending the webinars have commented that they have enjoyed the use of visuals and analogies suggesting that these have enhanced their learning.

As the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words. Take a look at the images that Rosie produced during the session, can you see your social work journey expressed in these? If you had to explain your social work journey in just a few words what would you say?

With many thanks to Rosie (Rossita Maclean) who I am always immensely proud of.