Abstract:

Perspective:
Macfarlane (2019) has stated that “time is profoundly out of joint – and so is place”. Covid-19 has challenged professionals and services to rethink their service delivery models. Home and office visits are a fundamental part of social work practice. Online platforms are not social work’s ‘natural habitat’. While some social services were responsive to the pandemic, other services in Ireland have struggled to provide staff with suitable hardware, technical support and practice guidance for working online. Remote working has forced the social work discipline to learn a new (technological) vocabulary. Many students, practitioners and educators are struggling with negotiating work/life balance and learning new skills. The performative aspect of online meetings can also be tiring. On the other hand, remote working is also encouraging social workers to reflect upon the environmental impact of our travel and use of resources in social work. The social work discipline is being challenged to re-imagine its professional and service delivery models. Professionals and users of our services need to be part of that debate: the profession cannot cede responsibility to technology companies and departments.

Method:
This paper showcases the authors’ collaborative pedagogical endeavors in disseminating resources and tools for online social work practice to students, novice practitioners, experienced workers, employment based organizations and higher education institutions in Ireland. With the advent of COVID-19 and the introduction of measures to ensure social distancing, Ireland quickly shut down. As social work academics with some experience in blending approaches to learning and teaching, we realized that we could apply this experience to support front-line practitioners and teams who wanted to shift some of their work online.

This paper will demonstrate the four strands of our pedagogical initiative, which was anchored theoretical approached to learning and teaching. These theoretically-informed methods include:
• civic engagement (Hunt, 2011) – we provided free consultation work to public, private and third sector social work organizations;
• putting knowledge to work ( Shulman, 2005) through dissemination of open access resources via a free Padlet;
• creating change through knowledge (Boyer, 1990) by creating free practitioner tools specific to social work practice about online meetings, online supervision, online communications skills, working from home;
• encouraging collaborative communities of practice (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015) by organizing the inaugural Irish Online Social Work Practice Webinar in June 2020.

Conclusion:
This paper will demonstrate our commitment towards deepening and enrichening the ongoing consideration and debate about the nature of social work’s ‘signature pedagogy’ (Shulman, 2005). We aim ‘…to continue to model and sustain the values of engagement, reciprocity, mutual respect and regard that are at the heart of things like service-learning’ (Shulman, 2007, p. 17), while also seeking to respond effectively to the changed educational landscape since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our fundamental argument is not that all social work practice should move online but our pedagogical endeavors have served to interrogate longstanding modes of practice by highlighting novel and alternative ways of working which do not necessarily erode the values and principles of the discipline.

Keywords:

Online Practice, E-Social Work, Remote-based Social Work Practice, Practice-minded Education, COVID-19.