Supporting Child Welfare Traineeship Students through an Online Peer Network
This article describes the implementation of a peer network for social work traineeship students pursuing or continuing careers in child welfare. Literature on the best principles and practices for online community building reviewed and an explanation of how these best practices were utilized to build the online community is provided. Initial program design is described as well as program developments that occurred over four years of the program. The article then examines how the program’s evaluation was carried out and reviews some of the evaluation data. The article concludes with a discussion about the successes and challenges experienced in building the peer network and how other social work or traineeship programs, or agencies, might use an online peer network to support social work students and professionals.
Educational and Social Benefits of Social Network Sites: Applications to Human Services Education and Practice
Online social network sites present opportunities for human service educators, practitioners, and clients. Human services education students can collaborate through multimedia networks, sharing ideas and experiences. Human services professionals can leverage online networks to problem solve, socialize and develop common resources, and clients can use such networks to engage in self-reflection and get support from those facing similar challenges. This chapter offers an introduction to online social network sites, summarizing their features, uses, demographics, and trends, and presents emerging research on their social and educational potential. An accompanying case study reveals how young adults might use online social network sites to further personal and educational goals. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how such sites might be employed by human services education students, practitioners and clients. ‘In education there should be no class distinction’. Confucius (K’ung Fu tzu 551-479 BC), Analects, ch.15, v.38 in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2004, p.238:8).
Commentary on Judith Fingert Chused’s “An Analyst’s Uncertainty and Fear”
Chused’s lovely clinical report is not only a cri de coeur from the trenches by a master clinical analyst. With her honest description of her ongoing countertransference experience and her sensitivity to telling nuance and detail, she provides us with a rare document that allows us to consider the unfolding of the transference-countertransference and intersubjective matrices of the analytic process in all their messiness, complexity, and moment-to-moment unfathomability. Chused avoids the preprocessed, neatly shrink-wrapped reports of momentary countertransference experiences, seemingly quickly thought through, sanitized of their inevitable infiltration by still-unresolved intrapsychic conflicts of the analyst, and transformed into mutative interpretations—in short, the kind of report that we sometimes see in our literature—and instead allows us to focus on a different but equally important realm of intersubjective experience: the enmeshment of irreducible or only partially reducible aspects of the analyst’s and the patient’s intrapsychic lives, as well as their fate in the analytic process and in the post-termination self-analytic reflections of both. Partly because of the richness of Chused’s report, and partly because of the always tentative quality of understanding that may be reached as