Claire Felix Baptiste
London South Bank University, UK
Title: Cracking the code nurse educators learning from the experiences of newly qualifed black social workers from the United Kingdom
Biography
Biography: Claire Felix Baptiste
Abstract
Historically the performance of black social work students has lingered way behind their white counterparts. Cracking the code is a qualitative phenomenological study that aims to identify the factors that influence academic success on the degree in social work. The studies objectives were to examine student constructs of academic success and explore behavioral factors that influenced their performance on the social work degree. Cracking the Code used face to face and synchronized interviews with newly qualified social workers (NQSW)’s and their former educators. Cracking the code found that the landscape for black social work students is changing. The preliminary results found that when black students are in the majority population they had the ability to mobilize and take ownership of their learning. The participants of cracking the code proved that they had the ability to overcome adversity and reframed the deficit models propagated by previous social work educational studies since they outperformed their white counterparts. Cracking the code has implications for the retention of future black social work students and the social work education curriculum. The findings for cracking the code can help in better understanding of the needs of black students in professional training and has implications for improving the performance of black students in other professional training environments.