Assignment 3.
Select an area of social work practice that interests you (e.g., mental health, addictions, working with refugees, working with children, working with youth, advocacy, or community development). Describe your personal framework in working with the trauma in this context/area. Consider the ways that your beliefs, values, assumptions, and knowledge guide how you will work with individuals, groups, and/or communities in this context/area. You may use example(s) such as doing a piece of art, making a video, organizing a group, or finding other way to illustrate your personal framework in working with the particular theme you have chosen.
Your assignment should demonstrate that your practice is informed by theories and/or research evidence and that you examine your values, beliefs, and assumptions in a critical way. This assignment can be written either in the first person or in the third.
Given this is a topic of trauma and it is obvious that you will have some specific knowledge about trauma, it would not be accepted if you argue that your framework is trauma informed. Your framework should be trauma specific.
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(About this assignment of personal practice framework, assume that in the future you work in a social work agency and you need to work with a group of people who experience certain type of trauma (you may just state in the beginning of the assignment that the clients that you plan to address in his assignment is a group of children who experienced domestic violence, bush fire survivors in a community, female refugees, refugee children, women who were abused by partners, etc.). People may ask you: “what is the framework you use to work with the clients?” As professionals, we need have the ability to explain the framework we use and the adopted theory(ies) and research evidence that support the framework. We may be required to provide examples to illustrate how we apply the framework in practice.
In this intensive topic, you will be introduced to trauma-specific interventions/services and different frameworks/approaches to work with trauma, such as psychodynamic therapy, group psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy, trauma-focus cognitive behavioral therapy etc. You will also be introduced resilience framework work with earthquake survivors.
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In deciding on a practice framework, you may argue, for example, that you use narrativebased/narrative therapy-based framework to work with a specific group of clients (you may need to address the group of clients in the beginning), you need to describe the framework (what the framework exactly is), address/justify the possible effectiveness of the framework in working with clients who experience trauma, and use an example (how narrative/narrative therapy will be conducted, - may through writing, interviewing, playing, or others) to illustrate how you apply the framework in practice. The practice framework in this assignment is flexible. You may use group-based framework, resilience-based framework, cognitive behavioral therapy-based framework, attachment-based framework, play-based framework, empowerment-based framework, neuro sequential model (please refer to the article titled developmental trauma close up in Intensive day 4’s page about this model), or other framework. However, whatever practice framework you propose, you need to describe the framework (what the framework exactly is), address/justify the possible effectiveness of the framework in working with clients who experience trauma, and use an example to illustrate how you apply the framework in practice.
Because this is a small assignment, so please focus on only one framework in this assignment. It should be noted that Judith Herman’s three-stage model cannot be regarded as a practice framework in this assignment. Judith Herman’s model may be regarded a roadmap/procedure for professionals working with clients with trauma. The model highlights the stages we need to follow and delineates the goals we need to achieve in our practice with clients. No matter what interventions/frameworks we use, we need to follow these steps or stages. The model itself does not tell us what intervention we need to use to work with clients.
About trauma-informed approach/framework, it has different definitions. However, it mainly indicates that our social workers need to be sensitive to the potential impacts of trauma on our clients and ourselves. Given this is a trauma topic, you are expected to have some professional knowledge about trauma after studying this topic. You are also expected to understand some professional interventions to work with clients with trauma. Therefore, you should go beyond trauma-informed approach/framework and adopt trauma-specific framework in this assignment. You may mention trauma-informed approach/framework in this assignment. However, you do not need to address/explain trauma-informed approach/framework in a detailed manner in this assignment.
Because social work is a value-laden profession, you may need to briefly address your personal and professional values, beliefs and assumptions as a way of justifying your
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personal practice framework. For example, you may argue that as a social worker, you prefer to work with strengths of clients and thus adopt a resilience-based framework or an empowerment-based framework.
With respect to theory(ies) that you may use to support the adoption of certain practice framework. You may use theory(ies) addressed in this topic. You may also use theory(ies) addressed in other social work topics or theories from other related disciplines like sociology, psychology, anthropology, and public health.) ______________________________________________