From Social Work “Best practice” in and outside Europe to Critical Reflection and Teaching

The study of the “best practices” provides a set of examples across different contexts to derive generalisable theories and give opportunities for teaching, learning and experimenting new programs creatively inspired by experiences developed elsewhere. This contribution focuses on a part of the research “The implications of neoliberal policy and management on social work and vulnerable populations” carried out in Finland, India, Italy, Russia, South Africa and United Kingdom. This project, funded by the European IRSES - Marie Curie program (contract n. 295203), is aimed at exploring on the impact of neoliberalism on social work in the above countries. Its final part is focused at developing frameworks and tools to improve the quality of social services delivered to the users in order to identify best practices already used and to develop new tools for different social work contexts. One of the outcomes from this research is of great interest for social work education: the collection and the analysis of best practices in different countries and fields like child protection, policy practice, service users empowerment, HIV/AIDS infected service users, psychiatric de-institutionalization, elderly people inclusion, juvenile criminality, disability and others provide a wide data base which can be very useful in stimulating a global perspective on the teaching and learning of students. Starting from the description of the best practices presented, students may developed a deeper understanding of social work practice also in their own context when they reflect on questions like: What are the methods used in this best practice? Why does this practice works better than others tried before? From whose perspective is the chosen practice defined as a best practice? This contribution is based on the analysis of materials contributed by the authors of several research teams involved in the project.