In the spirit of sharing, social care and health students ‘go Dutch’

Students learned valuable lessons in developing trust and communicating better with their future service users after a visit from their Dutch counterparts.

Third year students from Social and Community Practice, Social Care Joint Honours and Health and Social Care were joined by 20 students from HAN University in the Netherlands.

Their Dutch peers led two days of workshops designed to get Northampton students to think differently about what they are learning during their module Collaborating for Social Change.

The Dutch students are all studying Youth at Risk but as joint honours programmes with many varied subject areas, such as drama or sport. As such, the workshops aimed to throw into the discussions a wide array of different perspectives. They focused on:

• Sports and vulnerable young people (how to recognise that our assumptions and judgements about people may be incorrect)
• Drama, practicing cases (role playing and a meeting between a young person and a worker)
• Trust and Confidence building exercises for groups (for this exercise, one student would keep their eyes closed whilst their partner directed them safely around the Creative Hub building at Waterside campus).

As part of their degree, Northampton students will reflect on their workshop experience for their weekly journals.

Later in the week, both sets of students took part in a Housing and Community Living module led by Jodie Low, Senior Lecturer and Director of Free2Talk CiC.

Tre Ventour, Vice President BAME at Northampton Students’ Union and Serita Bonsignore, the University Equality and Diversity lead facilitated an informal discussion about the Dutch experiences of equality and diversity.

A final session on Wednesday afternoon providing an opportunity for students to hear about the work that Right Resolution CiC does with Care Leavers.

Rose Wambui, who is in the final year of her Social Care and Education Studies degree, said: “The exercise taught me to not judge a book by its cover. The Dutch student I worked with seemed to me like a single party girl, but she was actually very happily married!

“You need to accept people for what they are, however they look. This helps you to build trust with them, whether they are strangers or people you already know and this is vitally important, in all walks of life.”

Julie Creighton, final year Health and Social Care student, added: “This was a really illuminating week for me. Because of experiences in my past I can find it difficult to trust people. But in the line of work I want to go in to, you have to work with people’s positive aspects and to build that up from that with them. You have to comfortably put yourself into their shoes.”

Find out more about the University’s Health and Social Care (Foundation) degree.