By Adam J. Pearson Introduction As I researched the processes by which community groups attempted to make change in community practice, particularly when it comes to doing anti-oppressive practice work, one theme came strongly to the forefront. This is the theme of opposition to change and it directly ties into many of the examples we have…
Month: June 2018
6 Key Domains of Macro Social Work Practice
By Adam J. Pearson, Clinical Social Worker Specializing in Gerontological Social Work and Empowering People with Physical Disabilities (SAPA-DP) Introduction Social Work was designed from its onset to operate on multiple levels at once. At the greatest extremes of scale, we have micro-level clinical work with individuals, couples, and families and work on the macro-level…
Emotional Labour in Work With Older Adults and Palliative Care
By Adam J. Pearson In “Can Emotional Labour Be Fun?” Arlie Russel Hochschild poses a question as incisive as it is relevant to our own discipline of social work. Hochschild defines emotional labour as “the work of trying to feel the appropriate feeling for a job either by evoking or suppressing feelings — a task…
Cooking Up Empowerment: My Experience Creating, Running, and Teaching a Culinary Training Program for Teenagers with Severe Special Needs
By Adam J. Pearson In 2016, I received a phone call from a Vice Principal at the school at which I had previously worked as a Resource Teacher of Mathematics, English, Ethics and Religious Culture, and History, focusing my educational work on adolescents with severe behavioural needs and emotional, intellectual, and developmental disabilities. At this…
Person-Centered in Letter or Spirit?: A Review of Three Articles on Applications of Person-Centered Care with Older Adults in Long-Term Residential Care Facilities
By Adam J. Pearson Introduction: Person-Centered Care in Residential Settings for Older Adults In recent years, researchers have critiqued medical bureaucracies and institutions’ tendencies to reduce short-term patients and long-term residents alike to numbers, depersonalized medical problems, statistics, chunks of time, waitlist positions, or mere occupiers of beds to be discharged as soon as possible…
Through Lungs and Leaves
By Adam J. Pearson It’s a beautiful day To lie under a tree and breathe in the forest while the trees breathe in me. The mind in the forest And the forest in Mind, Flux of inter-being Separateness, cannot find. Each passing moment Is a death and rebirth– Earth springs into trees And trees turn…
Words from the Wind 