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Educational Development
Deena Mandell - "It's a life and learning thing"
Dec 10/10
Dr. Deena Mandell, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social
Work, believes in the old adage: "Take risks: If you win, you will be
happy; if you lose, you will be wise."
"It's the most important
thing, for me, that my classroom is a place where students feel OK to
think out loud, ask questions, and take risks," says Mandell, who
joined the faculty at Laurier in 1998. Along with instructing Masters
and PhD level students, she also began teaching in the Laurier
Association for Lifelong Learning (LALL) program for the first time
earlier this year.
"I have been a social worker for a good
part of my life," says Mandell, who worked professionally in Toronto
and Peel Region for 13 years prior to completing her PhD. "So, I do
have some skills at helping people feel they can trust the environment
in which they're in and feel supported in meeting their challenges --
there is definitely a skill base there that is transferred over from
social work."
Mandell also listens to her students. "We begin
those more challenging classes with a discussion about, 'What do you
imagine you're going to be asked to do here, and what do you need in
order to be able to achieve that?' And from there, we form a class
contract.
"There is a mix of applied work to get them prepared
for a difficult and challenging career, and it involves a lot of
themselves as people, their ideas and their beliefs. It is not the same
as teaching them geography or science."
Mandell believes
humility, and keeping an open dialogue with her students is key to
teaching professional graduate school. "As a teacher, you really need
to be aware of diversity in the classroom -- watch what you say, and
how you say it. And be sure that what you're teaching them doesn't only
apply to some groups, and yet it's being taught as what is universally
true.
"You really need to be aware that we don't all have the
same background, even when we look the same." she adds. "We really need
to start being aware that other people have different perceptions of
the world, and different experiences that can enrich the classroom. It
makes it a little more complicated to teach, but it also makes for a
much richer experience if you can keep that input coming in.
"One
more piece of advice for anyone starting to teach in this field, is to
find a balance between presenting your own prepared material in a way
you structured it, while being able to go with what is sparking the
students' interest at the moment."
In her own research early on
in her career, Mandell focused on the interfaces between families and
larger systems, including the justice system, health services and child
welfare. Currently, her work focuses on educational methodologies for
social work practice in the contemporary context. She has also
published two books along with numerous articles, presented at national
and international conferences and has done guest teaching in three
different countries abroad, by invitation.
At Laurier, the
courses she instructs in the Masters program include Social Work
Practice with Individuals, Use of Self, and Social Work Practice with
Families -- both basic and advanced levels. In addition, Writing for
Publication is a Doctoral level course she teaches.
"Most of
the classes I teach, students have to really put themselves out there,"
says Mandell, who taught six students in the doctoral program this past
year. "They really expose themselves to other people, their thoughts,
their skills in writing, along with their ability to apply what's being
learned.
"While it's not completely different from other
graduate schools -- there are some courses that are straight
theoretical stuff -- it is a different kind of environment, so the
requirements are different, because of the nature of what we're
teaching them, especially in the practice courses. The class sizes are
much smaller than undergraduate, but much bigger than your typical
graduate class. We'll get about 25 people in a class."
For Dr.
Deena Mandell, "it's a life and learning thing," she says about
teaching professional graduate school in the Faculty of Social Work.
"More than anything, I believe that a very big part of my role is to
encourage students to take risks, and to make them feel safe in doing
that, given that nothing is foolproof."
She concludes, "And that's my approach to preparing these people for a very difficult and challenging profession."
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