Introduction

To reflect upon what causes gaps between people is a challenge that should involve social workers and service users in social work practice, education and research. Within the PowerUs network, gap-mending practices have been developed whereby more reciprocal relationships are aimed for between social work students, teachers and service users in joint development projects. The principles of these practices are similar to those found in research about so-called strength-based social work, which emphasises the importance of enabling niches rather than placing an emphasis on categorising and diagnosing personal problems (Healy, 2014, p 166).

In this chapter we will write about a gap-mending course at Lund University in Sweden in which social work students and students from user organisations study together. The following chapter will explore how ‘mend the gap’ has been introduced in the UK. Together these chapters will demonstrate the strength of the approach and the diverse contexts in which it has been applied. In the Swedish example, marginalised and discriminated groups have been invited to study a 7.5-credit course together with social work students. The external students were recruited from different service-user organisations and have a background of drug abuse, mental health problems, homelessness, physical disabilities or a combination of these problems. Most of the external students can be considered to be far from the labour market. The work with the so-called Mobilisation course has continued, and the course ran for the 25th time this fall of 2019. In total, over five hundred social work students and 250 service-user students have participated in the course. The results of our research show that the participation in the course strengthens social work students as well as service-user students. Many of the service-user students continue on to further studies or work opportunities. Some of them are hired as guest teachers in other courses in the School of Social Work. Some continue to develop the project ideas that they have started with during their courses.

A central theme in understanding how gaps can be mended is how community and trust can be arranged or choreographed between groups that might have prejudice towards each other.