Empowerment and globalisation in a Nordic social work education context

Abstract

The Nordic countries have been experiencing paradigm shifts from a focus on problems, pathology and deficits to more strengths‐based, capacity‐building and inclusive approaches, especially in the field of child welfare. This article describes joint Nordic (Nordplus) Master level courses that have been introduced to promote a more inclusive and empowering way of working with children and families. The overall theme of the Nordplus project is democratisation of child welfare work. The project includes three separate courses: (i) Empowerment and family decision making in child welfare; (ii) Strengths and solution oriented child welfare work; (iii) Children, youth and participation. The project brought together masters students from the Nordic countries and professional academics from the Nordic countries, South Africa and Australia. This article describes and problematises the learning process and the outcomes of the project. An important aim of the project was to interrogate the relationship between the global and the local.

Care planning at home: a way to increase the influence of older people?

“…The professionals have limited power to make individual solutions, as their power is mainly rooted in the organisation [ 53 , 54 ]. This results in difficulties for the professionals to empower the older people to influence the needs assessment and decision-making [ 13 ].…”

A Strengths Approach to Supporting early Mathematics Learning in Family Contexts

“…Internationally, educators are asked to communicate children's strengths (NAEYC, 2004) and to move away from deficit approaches (Johansson et al, 2008). In Australia, current early years curriculum and policy documents, such as the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) (DEEWR, 2009) and the National Quality Framework (NQF) (DEEWR, 2011), advise that strengths approaches should be used in early childhood settings.…”