Integrating research and teaching in social work: building a strong partnership

In recent years in social work we have increasingly come to address the issue of how to integrate research into practice. Implicit in the research and practice discourse is an assumption that there is an active and reciprocal relationship between research and teaching. In this paper, we question this assumption and after setting the political context, we review research into the relationship between discipline-based research and teaching. We then explore a proposal to redefine knowledge, research and teaching and examine the concept of scholarship. We go on to review some strategies we will be promoting in the UK Higher Education Funding Council's Learning and Teaching Network Support (ltsn) Social Policy and Social Work Subject Centre (SWAP) to support the development of positive linkages between teaching and discipline-based research, specifically on-line possibilities for supporting research mindedness among academics (and students and practitioners). Finally, we end by briefly discussing the equally important integration of pedagogic research into the practice of teaching