Putting you in the picture: using visual imagery in social work supervision

The literature on social work supervision has consistently documented the impact of the work on the health and wellbeing of individual practitioners and the tensions they experience when mediating organisational demands with the needs of service users. Simultaneously, the quality and content of social work supervision has become increasingly vulnerable to both local and global systemic issues impacting on the profession. It is timely to explore effective short term, self-regulatory methods of support based on short/simple training for professionals. These can be used as a means of complementing and enriching their current supervision experiences and practice. We describe such a method involving an arts-based intervention in which five groups of social work professionals in England (n=30) were invited to explore guided imagery as a tool for reflecting on a challenge or dilemma arising in their everyday practice. Evaluation data was captured from the participants’ pre-workshop questionnaire; visual analyses of the images generated and the social workers narratives and post-workshop evaluation. We discuss the potential application of using visual imagery as a tool to bridge gaps in supervision practice and as a simple pedagogic tool for promoting contemplative processes of learning. Visual imagery can be used to strengthen social workers integration of different demands with their emotional supports and coping strategies.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Journal of Social Work on 16/01/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13691457.2018.1423546