Involving co-educators in social work education in the context of Covid-19: Reflections on challenges and potential solutions
Sarah Lonbay, Claire Russel, Julie Smiles
This paper provides a reflexive account of some of the challenges that are arising with the involvement of service users and carers (co-educators) in social work education within the context of Covid-19. As Higher Education Institutions shift to primarily delivering social work education online, this has a knockon impact for the involvement of co-educators and this is the focus of the paper. The paper focuses on two key challenges being experienced; access to and use of technology, and the difficulties of creating safe and meaningful spaces online. The authors offer a discussion of these challenges and present some potential solutions that can be adopted to continue to support co-educators within social work education.
Keywords
Service user and carer involvement, social work education, co-educators, digital inequality, participation, online working.
