Listening to black students… a critical review of practice education

In Higher Education Institutions we embrace the notion of having a diverse and international presence in our Universities, the University of Salford strives towards, ‘Aligning our offer to best support students to secure a place at the University and then succeed in their studies’. (UoS, 2016:7) and indeed the kudos of this link across the waters is held in high esteem and measured within the wider sense of Universities strategic commitments to internationally recognised research as well as in our rankings. Indeed Hawkins, (2017), states that ‘Students from outside the European Union make up 60 per cent of entrants to postgraduate full-time taught masters degrees’. This paper is co-written by members of the social work practice learning team at the University of Salford whose role is to locate placement providers and assess their capability to provide high quality learning environments for our students and to prepare students across both undergraduate and postgraduate social work programmes for their placement experience. We are in an HEI in a large multicultural city and attract a diverse group of students particularly post graduates. This paper engages with the challenge of how the team responded to the reporting of racism by two Black African female students who had been in a placement setting that had been used for many years prior to their allegations. We firmly believe that the experiences of students need to be heard and who better to seek this knowledge from, but our students. The co-creation of the exploration and learning which took place between students and our team members has been an emotional, yet extremely important one. One which we are keen to share amongst both practice learning academic teams, social work students and practitioners and practice educators. We confront the ‘uncomfortableness’ of racism, and power, within assessment with the support of our combined knowledge and shared experiences with our students.