Children, families & child protection

IRISSchildprotection

Allegations of abuse lead to an unfolding child protection case scenario which prompts us to consider the welfare of three children and their parents’ rights.

This is one of 22 multimedia learning resources published by Scotland’s Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services. The resources are designed for social work students and practitioners, but will also be valuable to others working with children and families. This case study by Mel Cadman & Kathryn Cameron has been designed as a focus for learning about the legal, ethical and practice issues emerging from a child protection case scenario. It consists of five short video clips with transcripts of the dialogue, and it takes about 15 minutes to watch in total.

This is an excellent resource! it is well-structured and there is much to learn from the components of this moving and realistic case study. The authors suggest that learners be asked to interpret and assess the unfolding scenario of complex needs and to consider how to respond. In an ideal world I’d have liked the authors to pose some questions of this nature and provide references to extend the learning. Link: http://content.iriss.org.uk/childprotection

Creative Commons Licence The whole package of resources appears to be downloadable as an IMS content package.

Evidence-based Interventions in Juvenile Justice

This 1 hour lecture published on 24 Nov 2011 is from a series of Sidney Ball Memorial Lectures at Oxford University.

Professor Mark Lipsey (Peabody Research Institute, Vanderbilt University, USA) discusses evidence-based interventions in Juvenile Justice: Concepts, Research, Practice, and Frontiers. The lecture can be downloaded and kept as either a 30MB mp3 audio or 521MB mp4 video.

This lecture is published with a licence that allows it to be edited, for example if you only want to play a short passage. However, I was frustrated that Mark Lipsey repeatedly refers to a diagram that the viewer is not shown!

Link: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/units/social-policy-and-intervention

Creative Commons Licence

Voluntary work with socially excluded children

This is one of 23 free online courses offered by the online European School of Volunteering (EVS),  a collaboration between Spanish, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greek and Italian organizations that was established as part of the 2011 Year of Volunteering. The task of producing multi-lingual courses that are applicable across the wide range of contexts found in European countries presents quite a challenge, so this is a remarkable achievement.

The courses are delivered through a Moodle VLE (virtual learning environment). All courses are provided in English, and many are available in additional European languages – Spanish in this case.

This goal of this course ‘Volunteering with Minors under Social Exclusion’ is to enable students to develop volunteer activities with minors under social exclusion, promoting teamwork, equality and social skills. It comprises 3 modules:

  1. Minors and Social Exclusion
  2. Models of Caring For Children and Volunteering
  3. Developing Social Skills and Other Actions

The course is informative, well structured and straightforward to follow. It comes with the full range of Moodle features – a tutor, study calendar, multimedia content, forums, graded quizzes and assignments – offering an engaging way to learn. Students are allowed three months to complete courses they register for, and I estimate this course takes 15 – 20 hours to study.

Individual documents etc. can be downloaded, but I can’t see a way to download a whole course package for offline study, and I haven’t been able to establish the copyright position of these courses.

Link: http://www.ev-school.com/