Evaluating the Integrative Framework for Practice Teaching with social care educators and students

This paper outlines an evaluation of the Integrative Framework for Practice Teaching (McGarr and Fingleton, 2020), a tool developed to support practice teaching within social care education in Ireland. A mixed methods approach was utilised, which included focus groups with 5 educators and a survey of 168 social care students from the City and Tallaght campuses of TU Dublin. Both educators and students reported the framework to be useful in supporting the integration of knowledge and to explain the context, role, and goal of social care work. Recommendations were made in relation to strengthening the representation of the workers’ ‘self’ on the framework visual to reaffirm the pivotal role of the personal and professional self in social care practice. The evaluation also identified wider pedagogical application beyond applied subjects, in particular potential to use the framework to integrate learning within practice elements of the programme.