Bringing together podcasting, social work field education and learning about practice with Aboriginal peoples and communities

Social work content podcasting has increased exponentially in recent years, playing a new role in the emerging social work education debate surrounding online and remote delivery of social work content. Although podcasting itself is not now a new digital innovation, how and why social work educators and academics would embrace the use of podcasting is still debated and is often positioned as inferior to face-to-face classroom teaching. In the Australian context this is particularly important when non-Aboriginal students are engaging with Aboriginal understandings of place and ways of relating to Country, a challenging reflexive exercise without the added complexity that remote educational delivery can provide. The brief history of podcasting and its relationship to social work education provides a context for re-imagining the pedagogy of critical thinking, with a case example provided of a remote field placement with The Social Work Stories Podcast during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.

A Synthesis of Findings from 'Rapid Assessments' of Disability and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for Response and Disability-Inclusive Data Collection.

INTRODUCTION: People with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by disasters, including health emergencies, and responses are not always inclusive or accessible. Disability-inclusive response and recovery efforts require rapid, contextually relevant data, but little was known about either the experience of people with disabilities in the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, or how rapid needs assessments were conducted. METHODS: We reviewed the available results from rapid assessments of impacts of COVID-19 on people with disabilities in low- and middle-income countries in Asia and the Pacific. Rapid assessment methods and questions were examined to describe the current approaches and synthesise results. RESULTS: Seventeen surveys met the inclusion criteria. The findings suggest that people with disabilities experienced less access to health, education, and social services and increased violence. The most rapid assessments were conducted by or with disabled person's organisations (DPOs). The rapid assessment methods were varied, resulting in heterogeneous data between contexts. Efforts to standardise data collection in disability surveys are not reflected in practice. CONCLUSIONS: Persons with disabilities were disproportionately impacted by the 'first wave' of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite complex implementation challenges and methodological limitations, persons with disabilities have led efforts to provide evidence to inform disability-inclusive pandemic responses.