Professor Jan Fook

I am a social worker from my initial training, and have spent the bulk of my career in academia. My initial degree was from the University of New South Wales, with a later Masters degree from the University of Sydney and a doctorate from Southampton University. My career has spanned several countries (Australia, the UK, Norway, Canada, and the USA) and several disciplines (social work, interprofessionalism, and education). I have held professorial positions in all these countries and discipline areas, and have also managed some academic departments. I am also a fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and have held numerous Visiting Professorial positions across the world.

Almost from the beginning of my academic career I became concerned with the basic problem of what was then called the “integration of theory and practice”. Whilst this may almost seem a relatively banal although universal concern, I felt it was incumbent upon social work academics to model, in detail, how this was done, rather than simply provide analysis or critique. Given my initial study of social work in the 1970’s, it was obvious that Marxist and structural critiques of the professions, whilst highly fashionable, did not successfully spell out how such analyses worked on the ground, especially in helping individual victims of the system. My overarching contribution began with detailing a model for the practice of radical casework (1993), and continued on to do something similar for postmodern critical perspectives. (“Critical Social Work” 2002, 2016, 2024; “Transformative Social Work, 2024))

As my profession was a relative newcomer to the academic scene, I also turned my attention to the gap between research and social work practice, in an effort to delineate what made the academic social work contribution distinctive. I first coined the term “practice research” (“The Reflective Researcher” 1996) in social work as an attempt to outline an approach to research which originated from the problems arising from practice, and thereby contributed directly to, the practice of the social work profession. This is an approach relevant for many different professions, and helps to integrate practice with research.

In subsequent years, building on some years of experience in educating social workers, I also noticed how, although most professionals are required to critically reflect, there was little detail on how this was practised in concrete and systematic terms. As with theory and research before this, I realized that social workers needed assistance to spell out how the ideals of critical reflection could actually work in real time, especially within the demands of practice.  I developed a practical model for this (initially based on the work of Donald Schon and John Dewey but also incorporating postmodern, critical, reflexive and spiritual traditions) and have travelled extensively internationally providing practical workshops for practitioners. This work has been the most important to me in my whole career. I have been constantly moved and humbled from seeing the transformative changes experienced by many professionals when they participate in deep critical reflection. Often they have been able to find a place of integrity arising from their distress when they try to help people within an inadequate system. Most of my recent books (from2006) detail the learning experience as well as the use of critical reflection in different settings.

Social Work PhD