Congratulations to Dr Gill Ferguson for the successful completion of her EdD Thesis

“When David Bowie created
Ziggy Stardust”
The lived experiences of social
workers learning through work

 

 

 

Abstract

The findings from this qualitative study sit at the intersection of knowledge about
workplace and professional learning, offering new insights into how social workers
learn through work. The study explored the unique lived experiences of social
workers’ learning through an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) study
(Smith et al., 2009).

IPA was selected to focus on the nature of the social workers’ lifeworld and their
lived experiences of learning in the workplace. In-depth individual interviews
gathered rich descriptions from sixteen social workers. The double-hermeneutic
cycle, a feature of IPA, explored the meaning that the social workers drew from
their experiences and the researcher making sense of the participants’ sensemaking. Individual and unique experiences of the participants were explored,
generating themes for the social workers through an immersive process of
analysis for each case in turn.

Superordinate themes were then identified across the group that revealed the
complexity of social workers’ learning experiences. These were, Journey of the
self; Navigating landscape and place; Navigating tasks; Learning through the
body; Learning through others; Practices and conceptions of learning; and,
Learning by chance. These aspects of the social workers’ lived experiences weave
together in a complex and enmeshed web, each thread connected to the others as
part of the learning process. Striking metaphors were used by social workers to
convey the meaning they associated with their learning in the workplace.
The thesis shows the nature and complexity of individual social workers’
experiences and how understanding these can help design more effective
workplace continuing professional learning opportunities. Drawing on rich
theoretical ideas from phenomenology and workplace learning, the thesis offers a
hybrid conceptual web model for social work professional development. This model acknowledges the unique experience of social workers within a complex
context involving navigation of task, place and embodied learning.

You can read Gillian’s thesis here: Gillian Ferguson theses.pdf (open.ac.uk)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr Gillian Ferguson @learnventurer

I’ve worked in diverse settings as social worker, community learning worker and various other roles in practice, HE and learning/development. Keen to be inspired and inspire others to learn. My doctoral research explored lived experiences of social workers learning through work.

@learnventurer

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