‘Where is the social work?’ Discovering and learning social work across Chinese and Norwegian contexts: A transcontextual perspective

Abstract

This article addresses how the global and local aspects of social work can be integrated into the internationalisation of social work education. Building on the transnational perspective, it introduces a transcontextual perspective, through which students develop critical and reflective knowledge about the importance of context in shaping social work practices. Such a perspective implies a dynamic understanding of social work, whereby any given social work practice can be understood as a contextual enactment. Using one short-term Sino-Norwegian exchange programme as an example, the article demonstrates how a transcontextual perspective can be implemented to foster transcontextual reflectivity among the students.

Keywords

Contextual social work internationalisation of SW education student exchange transcontextual learning transcontextual reflectivity transnationalism

Introduction

Ten years ago, a colleague of mine and professor in social work (SW) came to me and asked whether I could help her answer an email she had received from a Chinese student, who intended to apply for the international master’s programme in SW, of which the professor was in charge. An undergraduate student in SW at a Chinese university, this student asked, ‘Although an international education is quite attractive, I wonder in what ways an education from Norway, with knowledge about the SW practice in a North European context, can be relevant to me who will practise SW later in China?’ The colleague wanted to discuss this question with me, because I myself am from China. I do not remember how exactly our discussion went, but I have often thought about this question since.

From 2018 to 2019, I led a collaborative project on SW education between a Norwegian and a Chinese university. In this project, we developed a practice-oriented, short-term exchange programme, which aimed to help the students achieve a reflective, contextual and intercultural understanding of SW through international exposure. In 2019, master’s degree students in SW from the two universities participated in this exchange programme and met twice, once in Norway and once in China, for 1 week of intense joint teaching activities at both sites. Activities included lectures, seminars, field visits to SW institutions and student group work, followed by group presentations in plenary sessions. Although both groups of students expressed later how they had benefited from this exchange programme, I remember two similar events that happened during the field visits in Norway and China, respectively. Towards the end of the field visits in Norway, one Chinese student came up to me and asked, ‘Ms. Zhao, when are we going to visit the SW organisations in Norway?’ In other words, the student did not perceive the field visits we had just done as being related to SW. Similarly, in China, during lunch right after our visit to a professional SW agency, which works to support local non-governmental organisations (NGOs), one of the Norwegian students said, ‘We do not really understand why we visited this organisation, as it is not related to SW, is it?’

‘Where is the social work?’ It seemed that both groups of students had become confused when the context of SW was suddenly changed. The students’ reactions reminded me of the question from the Chinese student I referred to in the beginning: ‘How can knowledge about SW in northern Europe be relevant to me who will practise SW in China?’ Both boil down to a question of whether and how internationalisation of SW education can help strengthen students’ understanding of SW as contextual practice, which in turn reflects a tension between the global and local focus of SW education and practice (Borrmann, 2022; Dominelli and Loakimidis, 2017; Lyngstad, 2013). When the specific contexts involved (in this case Norwegian and Chinese) are so starkly different, both institutionally and culturally, can the students really learn from each other, and if yes, what can they learn – and how? This article discusses these questions and introduces a transcontextual perspective in developing international SW education, which builds on the transnational perspective in SW. Through the example of the short-term exchange programme, it demonstrates how the introduced transcontextual perspective can be implemented in the students’ learning process and how such practice can help the students to see the links between the global and local aspects of SW through a transcontextual reflectivity.

International SW education and the need to integrate global and local aspects of SW

International SW education is defined as all efforts to internationalise SW education, which usually focuses on national, regional and local contexts (Anish et al., 2021). Internationalisation of SW education takes place in several intertwined global processes with driving forces from both within and outside the profession. First, in line with the continuing process of globalisation, SW increasingly deals with problems that either arise across national borders (e.g. international refugee crises) or need to be addressed beyond a singular national context (e.g. the various challenges immigrants can encounter in the host country, or unemployment as a result of global economic and health crises). Second, the general global trend of internationalisation of higher education, which is also characterised by the trends of commercialisation, commodification and marketisation (Altbach, 2001; Dominelli, 2010), has not only driven large streams of students and scholars from the global south to pursue higher education and academic careers in the global north, but also creates a norm of mobility for students and faculties in the global north. Third, international SW education is developed in a simultaneous process where SW as a global profession strives to globalise its activities and extend its research agenda to the wider context of globalisation (Borrmann et al., 2007; Sammon et al., 2003). To position SW as a global profession, there is also a need to ensure the quality of SW education, for example, by setting global standards, which I will discuss later on. Finally, the profession’s humanistic traditions and political engagements in questions concerning global developments have made many social workers in the global north consider assisting developing countries a part of their professional mission, as is also reflected in SW students from the global north doing a period of practical training in the global south through international SW organisations. In short, as both a profession and a discipline, SW is not only concerned with local issues, but also has a global focus and international dimensions.

Hokenstad (2012) addresses the international dimensions in SW education and identifies several models and opportunities to internationalise SW education. These include the following: (1) infusion through regular courses, that is, international topics, perspectives and standards are integrated into the national core curricula– for example, it is a requirement that international literature and perspectives must be included when developing SW curricula in Norway (Ministry of Education and Research, Norway, 2017); (2) specialist options and degree programmes with a particular focus on the international aspects of SW– the international master’s programme in SW mentioned in the introduction is one such example; (3) student and faculty exchange, such as the short-term Sino-Norwegian exchange programme that this article builds upon. While Hokenstad’s model focuses on the structural prerequisites for internationalising SW education, other scholars argue that the vital aspect of internationalising SW education is not about structural prerequisites, but rather the specific role of certain international-oriented perspectives and how these perspectives can be integrated into different structural frameworks (Anish et al., 2021).

One of the important discourses in international SW education is that of global standards. One prominent example is the ‘Global Standards for the Education and Training of the Social Work Profession’ (IASSW, 2020; Sewpaul and Jones, 2004), which consists of nine key standards defined to ensure the quality of SW education internationally. The emphasis and discourse on universal global standards can be said to build upon a universalist understanding, that is, despite the differences among various local SW practices, there are aspects that are common and universal. In other words, the local practices are specific forms or expressions of the universal foundations of SW, including key principles, values and the knowledge base, which are accepted as being globally universal. Another example of efforts to internationalise SW through the discourse of global standards is the global definition of SW by the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW). However, the global standards have been widely debated and criticised (see Akintayo et al., 2018). The debates and critiques touch upon not only what is to be defined as ‘universal’ standards, which had led to several rounds of revisions of the global standards (IASSW, 2020), but also whether such standards are even needed, because the very idea of global standards can overlook the widely different traditions and cultures of ethnic groups across and within different societies (Gray and Webb, 2015). The global standards can also sound misleading, in the sense that we often assume that practice that meets ‘international standards’ is good practice. This clearly runs against the contextual understanding of SW, a consensus that ‘good’ SW practice is always and inevitably contextual, and that SW as a profession varies enormously according to historical, geographical and institutional contexts (Healy, 2005; Lyngstad, 2013).

Another line of critique of the global standards concerns the (post)colonial power relations in the global knowledge regime generally (Mignolo, 2000) and in SW specifically (Righard, 2018). SW as a profession is rooted in Western industrial societies. The dominant understanding of common principles and values in SW, such as social justice, human rights and collective responsibility, is often framed in Western contexts that value individual freedom and privacy. The knowledge base that SW builds upon was also mainly developed from Western contexts. In other words, the discourse on universal global standards may risk resulting in maintaining or even strengthening the existing coloniality of power relations in internationalising SW practice and education. The continually recurring debate about universalism versus cultural relativity in SW (see Bar-On, 2003: 27; Healy, 2007) reflects the increasingly critical attitude in the global south towards northern SW (Straub, 2016). However, if we adhere to cultural relativism and simply claim that good SW practices are always contextual, why even bother to internationalise SW education? There is thus a need to go beyond the universalism–relativism debate to understand the contextual and international aspects of SW, or to integrate the local and global focuses of SW education.

As mentioned, the vital aspect of internationalising SW education is not about structural prerequisites, but about how to integrate certain international-oriented perspectives into different structural frameworks. One such perspective can be the intercultural perspective, which aims to help students develop intercultural or culture-reflexive competence (Anish et al., 2021). Lyngstad (2013) also argues for a comparative perspective and states that internationalisation of SW education and the emphasis on the contextual feature of SW practices are ‘two sides of the same coin’ through a comparative lens (p. 415). In this article, I develop and argue in favour of a transcontextual perspective, which is developed from the transnational perspective in SW.

From transnational to transcontextual perspective and the practice of translation in transcontextual learning

In recent years, discussions on transnationalism have also surfaced in the knowledge field of SW (e.g. Firang, 2022; Righard, 2018; Schwarzer, 2016). The terms ‘international’ SW and ‘transnational’ SW are sometimes used interchangeably, but they differ in meaning and origin. ‘International SW has a longer history – emerging initially in the global north – and serves as a foundation for exchange between social workers from different countries’ (Kämmerer-Rϋtten et al., 2016: 2). While international SW is more descriptive, seeking to capture various global aspects of SW, transnational SW entails an explicitly theoretical perspective of transnationalism, which focuses on ‘the ongoing interconnecting or flow of people, ideas, objects or capital across borders of nation-state’ (Levitt and Schiller, 2004: 5) to enable deeper understandings of a series of globally contingent social, political, economic and cultural processes (Faist, 2013). Furman et al. (2010) defines transnational SW as ‘an emerging field of practice that (a) is designated to serve transnational populations; (b) operates across nation-state boundaries whether physically or through new technology; and (c) is informed by and addresses complex transnational problems and dilemmas’ (p. 8). In SW research, the transnational perspective is often employed to explore the relationship between transnationality (as a result of transmigration and globalisation) and the profession of SW (e.g. Firang, 2022; Furman et al., 2010; Schrooten et al., 2016).

However, the transnational perspective is not restricted to the SW fields that are directly linked to international migration or intercultural issues. For example, Wallimann (2014) argues that the transnational perspective should cut across all areas of SW and be used as a variable in the same way as gender. Other scholars, including myself, argue that it can be adopted as an overarching critical perspective to challenge SW as a discipline and profession, which is primarily based on unmarked national identity and stereotypes functioning as an underlying force in the construction of ‘otherness’ (Righard, 2018; Schwarzer, 2016; Zhao and Moen, 2022). The latter approach can therefore be understood as a response to postcolonial critiques of the hegemony of Eurocentrism or ‘Westernness’ in global knowledge regimes, which is also juxtaposed with ‘the professional imperialism’ in SW (Midgley, 1983). According to Schwarzer (2016), a transnational perspective adds a cross-national dimension to enquire into the relationship and dynamics between the local and global aspects of SW by creating spaces to look at (1) similar challenges in different contexts, (2) local aspects of globalisation and (3) equality. Particularly, she talked about how a transnational perspective can entail a practice of translation for fruitful exchange of experiences locating in different contexts:

Transnational social work points to the possibilities for social work theorists and practitioners to learn from experience and thinking in other national contexts. This exchange needs to start in someone’s own context by knowing and critically reflecting on norms and national framing as well as in other contexts. Taking this into account opens the possibilities for transferring or translating strategies and knowledges as well as seeing the limits of this. Translating means a process of hearing, understanding, and reflecting the possibility of applying knowledge to a new context. (Schwarzer, 2016: 9)

The translation of knowledge framed in a transnational perspective not only recognises the contextual aspect of SW as comprising local practices, but also focuses on local-to-local, or translocal interactions. This translocal focus is also considered a more ‘grounded’ concept of transnationalism ‘from below’ (Smith and Guarnizo, 1998). Embedded in SW education and practice, the translocal focus entails a process of SW students and practitioners situating themselves across the different contexts. A transcontextual perspective sheds light on exactly this cross-contextual situating of students and practitioners as the subject of learning and doing SW. From this perspective, international exchange within the field of SW is never simply about knowing how SW is conducted in other contexts with different norms and national/local institutional frames. Instead, it is about developing a critical and reflexive relationship to one’s own practices, norms and contexts through translocal interactions and transcontextual reflectivity.

Translating knowledge in a transcontextual framework is thus a highly reflective and reflexive practice, which requires the students to deconstruct and reconstruct the SW practice in a given context, instead of taking it for granted or understanding it as such. In this respect, the transcontextual perspective also comprises a dynamic understanding of SW practice as a contextual enactment, or a constant process of doing SW in a specific context, which consists of translating knowledges, not only across different locations but also across disciplines, given the transdisciplinary aspect of SW. I argue that this transcontextual perspective in international SW education with a processual understanding of SW can strengthen the students’ contextual understanding of SW by enabling them to see both the dynamics between SW practice and the changes of contexts, and the connectivity of different local contexts framed in a wider global processes. The prefix ‘trans’ in ‘transcontextual’ implies that ‘the local context’ is in itself a relational concept, that there is no ‘local’ independent of a wider (global) spatial connectedness.

In the coming parts, I will demonstrate how the proposed approach of translation framed in a transcontextual perspective can be implemented, using the short-term Sino-Norwegian exchange programme as an example. Since the exchange programme is practice-oriented, that is, field visits are used to shape empirical bases for students to engage in transcontextual learning, I will first provide some necessary background information on SW in the two countries, especially SW in China, which is relatively unknown.

SW situated in Norwegian and Chinese contexts

Internationally, SW as a profession can be traced back to a series of social movements (e.g. advocated by Jane Addams and Mary Richmond) to address the emerging social questions in Europe and North America at the turn of the 20th century (Stuart, 2013). However, the professionalisation of SW in any given context also has a locally embedded history and trajectory.

In Norway, the development of the profession is often presented as an integrated part of the constitution of the Norwegian welfare state in the post-war period (Levin, 2010). However, the creation of the profession actually started in the 1920s, when the women’s organisation Norske Kvinners Nasjonalråd started a school that offered courses in SW to educate women from lower social classes (Dahle, 2010). The development of the welfare state has, however, provided an important context for the development path of the profession. Not least, it has created positions and defined areas in which the profession is anchored. As a result, the majority of social workers in Norway are employed by the public sector, mostly by municipal authorities in areas such as social services, child care, rehabilitation and home-based care. In addition, a significant number of social workers are hired by the state, working in hospitals, psychiatric institutions, child protection and welfare services and so on. Very few social workers work in private institutions and NGOs in Norway.

In China, the origin of SW is presented in two discourses: the origin of indigenous SW, which focuses on the cultural traditions of the helping activities that have always existed in civil society throughout history; and the origin of the professional SW imported from Western industrial societies (Peng et al., 2019). A common consensus is that professional SW was introduced in China in the 1920s, with the establishment of the ‘Peking Students’ Social Service Club’ (Peng et al., 2019; Xia and Guo, 2003). The development of professional SW was halted for nearly four decades by the governing Chinese Communist Party, which regarded SW as a product of Western capitalist systems and assumed that no social problems would exist within a socialist regime. It was reintroduced in the late 1980s as part of the welfare reform to tackle the emerging social problems and increasing social inequalities as a consequence of the economic reform (Leung et al., 2012; Niu and Haugen, 2019). Since then, we have witnessed a rapid development of SW in China, which is also reflected in the development of SW education. SW as a university discipline was first recognised in 1986 when four universities started to provide SW programmes. The number of universities providing SW programmes has surged from 20 in the 1990s to more than 300 today (Bai, 2014; Wu et al., 2016). In total, China has trained more than 1 million individuals in SW, and 312,000 people are employed as social workers (Niu and Haugen, 2019).

One important discourse in developing SW in China is the ‘indigenisation of SW’, which is also called ‘social work with Chinese characteristics’ in official documents (Anish et al., 2021), with a focus on how SW as an imported profession can be adapted to the current Chinese realities and embedded in the existing systems (Bai, 2014). In this context, the development of community-based SW is particularly central regarding the two specific roles of SW: social service delivery and social governance. In China, community (shequ) is defined as an urban precinct under the governance of the street office, which is the lowest level of urban governance (Wong, 1992). It was established in the late 1980s to replace the work unit (danwei) to organise and distribute basic social services or welfare goods in urban areas (Tang and Sun, 2017). When discussing community-based SW, Yang (2018) talks about an institutional competition between the traditional civil affairs administrative work model conducted directly by local governments and the ‘imported’ SW model, where the government outsources service deliveries to NGOs (see also Leung et al., 2012).

In Chongqing, where the Chinese part of the exchange programme was located, the divisions and co-existence of the two types of SW are discernible. SW within the civil affairs administrative model is often conducted by local government employees. Many of them do not have a university degree in SW, but have been re-channelled into these positions after vocational SW training with a Vocational Qualification Certificate for social workers. They often have a good overview of the residents in their unit and are thus well positioned to identify needs for SW services or interventions. Since they represent the government and have a supervisory administrative role vis-à-vis the grass-roots social organisations, they are also able to efficiently mobilise formal and informal resources to respond to the identified service needs or problems (Yang, 2018). The ‘imported’ SW done by NGOs is often project-based and frequently specialised in certain service areas or focuses on certain service user groups (e.g. elder care and empty-nest elderlies; children/youth and juvenile drug prevention). A large proportion of social workers in this category have a university degree in SW. Although they have professional expertise in designing and implementing SW projects, they are highly dependent on local governments for attaining resources. Compared with social workers within the government system, they are less efficient at mobilising local resources due to a generally low recognition of SW as a profession in China (Wu et al., 2016).

Implementing the transcontextual perspective in the Sino-Norwegian student exchange programme

As expounded earlier, a transcontextual perspective in SW education focuses on local-to-local interactions, which can enable us not only to recognise the relational aspects of given local contexts, but also to see the dynamics of SW in relation to the changes of contexts. One approach to such local-to-local interactions is the practice of translation based on critical reflections on norms and national/local framings of both one’s own and other contexts. This approach not only provides possibilities for transferring knowledges, strategies and practices, but also enables us to see the limitations. The question is how to apply this approach in practice? Here, I use the Sino-Norwegian short-term exchange programme as an example. The purpose of this exchange programme is to enhance the students’ contextual understanding of SW by engaging them in the practice of transcontextual translation, with a particular focus on what cannot be transferred.

The programme consisted of two parallel exchange weeks in Norway and China respectively, which means the students have met each other twice, first in Norway in April 2019 and then in China in October 2019. A total of 10 students pursuing a master’s degree in SW participated in the exchange programme: 4 Norwegian and 6 Chinese students, comprising 2 males and 8 females.

Each exchange week started with introductory lectures on campus on the welfare/social security system, social problems and SW in the respective countries. These lectures aimed to provide the students both with the necessary contextualisation before engaging them in the translocal and transcontextual interactions, and with some theoretical tools for conducting critical reflections.

The second and third days were field visits. In Norway, the students visited the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV), a regional shelter centre and a municipal health and welfare centre. In China, the students visited an elder care institution, two community SW service centres, a professional SW agency supporting local NGOs and a school for children with special needs. The choice of field visits was guided by the following considerations: (1) that they should to some extent represent an identifiable common practice model in the given national context (e.g. NAV in Norway, and the community-based SW in China); and (2) the interests of the students, that is, what they would like to learn more about (e.g. SW with elderlies and children suggested by the Chinese and Norwegian students, respectively). During the field visits, the hosts gave a tour and presentation of the visited institution, followed by a short seminar, providing the students with an opportunity to raise and discuss questions with the local social workers, fellow students and accompanying teachers.

On day 4, the students were divided into mixed-nationality groups to discuss and solve the assigned tasks centring on the meaning of the context, implementing SW in different welfare regimes and reflecting on their experiences from the field visits. The group work aimed to create a transnational and translocal space for the students to conduct the transcontextual translations. In this way, the group tasks function as a guideline for the translation practice, as they point to not only what are to be translated, but also how. The group work tasks in Norway and China were identical, apart from the change of focused context and the exchange of the roles as guest and host students. Here, I use the group tasks for the exchange week in Norway as an example. There are a total of five tasks, but the practice of translation is mainly deployed in tasks 3 and 4.

In task 3, we asked the guest students (the Chinese students in this case) to identify the aspects from the field visits that ‘either have made the strongest impression or are difficult to understand’ and encouraged both the guest and host students to discuss the aspects together in relation to the characteristics of the welfare/social security model and the wider social and cultural contexts. Here we took the perspective of the guest students as the point of departure and to highlight the needs for translation in intercultural discussions and learning. In task 4, we asked the students to choose one social service or SW intervention from the field visits and discuss whether this kind of practice can be transferred, or indeed translated, from the Norwegian context to the Chinese context. To guide the transcontextual translation, we had also formulated several guiding questions including:

What makes it possible and what might be the obstacles?

What will happen if we move the Norwegian model directly to China?

How to possibly revise the services to adapt to the service needs in the Chinese context?

Please also consider how problems for SW interventions are constructed/defined differently in the two contexts: why certain problems (e.g. domestic violence, children’s protection, etc.) are considered to be social problems and thus social workers’ tasks to solve in one country, yet not so in the other country?

The questions are all heuristic in that it is not the answers themselves that are important here, but rather the process of embedding a concrete SW practice in two starkly different contexts. While the first three questions seemed to be more based on the students’ empirical experiences, the last question was intended to help the students to build links between the empirical knowledge and theoretical perspectives, for example, a social constructivist understanding of social problems as was introduced in the lectures on day 1.

On the final day, the groups presented the results of their group work in a collective workshop with the teaching staff from both universities. After the workshop, we invited the Norwegian and Chinese students to evaluate the week’s learning activities in the form of focus groups, where the students reflected upon their transcontextual learning.

From transcontextual translation to transcontextual reflectivity: The students’ experience

In this part, I discuss the students’ experience of participating in the exchange programme. My discussion is based on participants’ observations on the field visits, group discussions and presentations, the four focus groups and 10 individual essays, where the students were asked to reflect upon their learning experiences in this exchange programme.

When evaluating the exchange programme, both the Chinese and the Norwegian students reported that the most fruitful part was the discussions in the group work. One of the Norwegian students said,

What I gained most [from the exchange programme] is without a doubt the understanding of context. We all had learned before, even in our Bachelor’s, that context is important. But when we came here [China] and when we had discussions with the Chinese students, the meaning of context became very, very clear. I remember the first discussion we had: our perceptions of social work, social problems, differed a lot. So we spent a long time discussing and clarifying the differences and the things we did not understand. It is so important to have these discussions, or else I doubt [whether] we would actually have been talking about the same things.

This excerpt somehow mirrors the confusion expressed by both groups of students during the field visits. The examples I mentioned in the introduction indicate that the students may not perceive the SW practice they observed in another context as being SW, precisely because, as the student pointed out, their perceptions of SW and social problems differ so widely. Thus, it was with these differing perceptions that the two groups of students met in the group work. The group work or the discussions between the Norwegian and Chinese students can therefore be understood as encounters of different perceptions of SW and social problems framed in their respective given contexts, or inter-contextual encounters. As shown in the quote, for being able to discuss the assigned tasks, the group first had to spend a long time discussing the different perceptions and clarifying the things they did not understand, which is exactly the translation we expected them to do.

From our observation of the group work, we found that it took some time for the students to start discussing the concrete tasks. As the quoted Norwegian student said, clarifying some of the basic concepts and making sure the group shared a common understanding were necessary prerequisites for the discussions of the tasks. However, the translation work is not a linear process as it may sound like in the above quote: that once the concepts are clarified, the subsequent discussion would go smoothly. We also found that the students did not always do the tasks in order, tending to move back and forth. One Chinese student said,

In one way, these tasks are related. But on the other hand, it is also as if the new information we got from the Norwegian students in discussing a new task suddenly made us get some new understanding or new questions concerning issues we had discussed earlier. So sometimes we didn’t know which tasks we were discussing, because for us, it is all about trying to understand the Norwegian contexts.

As this quote demonstrates, the students did not simply receive the information about the new context; they also tried to understand this information or make sense of it by referring to their earlier experiences and knowledges framed in their own context, which results in new perspectives, further questions and sometimes even more confusion.

For example, when discussing the underuse of shelter services in China, the Chinese students explained, ‘If a husband and wife are fighting over disagreements, the wife is supposed to maintain the family balance and put up with it, like having to put up with it for the sake of their child’. Later, when they discussed the left-behind children in China, the puzzled Norwegian students raised an interesting question: ‘Isn’t it contradictory that while the mother had to endure domestic violence for the sake of her child, she still chooses to abandon the child with the grandparents for the sake of money (observation notes)?’

This example illustrates that the translation process requires the students to re-situate themselves in a new practice context while simultaneously referring to their own contextual framework of sense-making and knowledge. This implies that the students need to constantly switch their situatedness between the two contexts, and to reflect on certain social issues or relations. Doing this carves out a space or learning position for transcontextual learning. As the students summarised, what they considered most valuable in this transcontextual learning is not necessarily knowledge about SW in a new context, but rather a better understanding of their own contexts, such as why SW in their own context is practised or constructed per se, how it is shaped by the local conditions, and what these local conditions might be and how they are related. This reflectivity is thus shaped by encounters and shifting situatedness across two different local contexts, which I call transcontextual reflectivity.

It is also through this transcontextual reflectivity as a result of transcontextual learning and translation that the students could finally see how SW is institutionalised differently in two welfare systems, and how this different institutionalisation has influenced the organisational setting in which the social service is provided, for example, directly by the state or through the NGOs. Furthermore, it has enabled the students to deconstruct SW practice per se, encouraging them to think further about what material, social and cultural factors have conditioned our understanding and practice of SW.

Nevertheless, despite the fruitful learning outcome, we also observed that the students inevitably drew some comparisons, especially at the beginning of the exchange programme, where they displayed a rather simplistic, unnuanced understanding of certain aspects of Chinese and Norwegian society and culture. We also noticed that the Chinese students struggled more than the Norwegian students in the beginning of group work and in writing academic essays, because this style of reflective learning was quite new to them (see also Zhi et al., 2021). When evaluating the programme, both groups of students expressed a need for more time to engage in transcontextual learning. Although this critical feedback largely reflects financial constraints and the time limits of a short-term exchange programme (Moorhead et al., 2022), I believe this could partly be remedied by introducing the perspective of transcontextual learning prior to the actual exchange, so that the students are better prepared for the international exposure and transcontextual translations.

Conclusion

In this article, I have discussed how to integrate the focuses on both the global and the local aspects of SW in internationalising SW education. My point of departure is that the vital part of internationalising SW education is not about structural prerequisites, but about how to integrate certain international-oriented perspectives into different structural frameworks (Anish et al., 2021). Building on the transnational perspective in SW, I have developed and introduced a transcontextual perspective in SW education. Particularly, I argue for the practice of a transcontextual translation, through which the students develop critical and reflective knowledge about the importance of the context in shaping any given SW practices. Furthermore, such a transcontextual perspective implies a dynamic understanding of SW as a process of doing SW, whereby any given SW practice can be understood as a contextual enactment. Using the short-term Sino-Norwegian exchange programme as an example, I have demonstrated how the transcontextual perspective and practice of transcontextual translation can be implemented. Drawing upon the students’ experience, I argue that through transcontextual learning that focuses on local–local encounters, interactions and translations, the students can develop a transcontextual reflectivity, which enables them not only to see the links between the global and local aspects of SW, but also to achieve a more reflective and dynamic understanding of how contexts shape or condition SW practice.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The project was funded by the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education (DIKU), project number: UTF-2017-two-year/10041.

ORCID iD

Yan Zhao

Author biography

Yan Zhao holds a PhD degree in Sociology, and she is a Professor in Social work at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Nord University, Norway.

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