The client as learner and the clinician as teacher: Working with an educational lens

Abstract

This article highlights the social worker's role as educator and how that role relates to clinical practice. The educational component of practice is not grounded in a substantial theoretical, research, or practice literature, and yet teaching is a nascent role for most clinicians. For the most part, the educational aspects of clinical practice have languished, at least from a theoretical perspective, in the shadow of therapy. In this paper we advocate for developing and articulating the clinician/teacher role in order to support effective use of the learning relationship as a dynamic and necessary means for assisting clients in managing life transitions, developmental challenges, and adversity. We propose the use of an educational lens derived from the fields of education, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, to provide perspective from which the client is viewed as learner, and the client‐work relationship is seen as an educational transaction. We highlight the transformative power of educational transactions that we think are as significant as primary caregiving, and also provide a working definition of education as it is used in clinical teaching‐learning relationships. And finally, we elaborate on the range of purposes education may serve in social work practice.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.