Seeing theory in action: Reflections from our social sciences placement

In today’s blog, UNSW Social Science students Isabela Pantos and Jessica Fell draw on their placement with Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand to explore how academic knowledge, practice wisdom, lived experience and evaluation can work together to inform stronger policy and services.

People collaborating around a diagram of connected ideas, illustrating how research, evidence, policy and practice inform one another. Source: Magnific

Over the last three years of our social science degree, we’ve mostly framed policy through theory, examining it at a distance. Our time at Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand has shown us what it looks like when women, children and families are placed at the centre of a service, and how trauma-informed advocacy can open otherwise unattainable options.

Above all, it has taught us that good practice and policy depend on many forms of knowledge working together: the academic foundations from our degree, the practice wisdom of frontline staff, the lived experience of the people services support, and the evidence that evaluation brings together. Three experiences shaped this understanding: a tech abuse workshop, working with the Marrickville Financial Independence Hub team, and seeing evaluation at work across the policy and evidence cycle. 

Our placement with Good Shepherd is giving us the real-world understanding that our degree alone cannot 

There is an aspect of completing a humanities degree that removes you from the real world. Process, structured learning and case studies are necessary, but they cannot show how social work is really practised. Our UNSW Social Science degrees include a placement with a host organisation. We chose Good Shepherd, where we work alongside frontline practitioners, coaches and counsellors supporting clients. Being co-located with its programs and services, we are starting to see how theory, practice and lived experience inform one another, how the system works, and where its gaps are. 

Linking theory to practice: Workshop on technological abuse 

We were invited to sit in on a workshop about tech abuse, run by a coach from the Women’s and Girls’ Emergency Centre. This was a standout moment in our placement because it brought several forms of knowledge into one room: the coach’s practice wisdom, the lived experiences of victim-survivors, and the theoretical frameworks we have studied. It showed us how these shape each other in responding to emerging policy concerns. The workshop also resonated personally, as having an online presence and using location services are the norm amongst young women our age. It became evident that this normalisation of online presence and digital dependency contributes to the broader attitudes that enable technological abuse. Although designed to help Good Shepherd practitioners further support victim-survivors, the workshop also gave us insight into the policy structures we aim to influence. We were reminded of the systems in place to protect the community, and where those systems fail. 

Seeing the frontline: Working with the Financial Independence Hub team in Marrickville 

Working alongside the Financial Independence Hub team, we have seen that interpersonal skills and strengths-based communication are key to supporting participants. We have also come to understand the non-linear and unstructured realities of community service and policy application. Frontline workers operate within the lived realities of social diversity, adversity and crisis, so they are often the first to see how policy plays out in real situations. This makes them some of the best-placed stakeholders to inform policy, and it is their knowledge that evaluation helps capture and carry into the evidence base. 

Evaluation is an opportunity to bring different forms of evidence together to influence policy 

Before our placement, we understood evaluation as mainly a troubleshooting process for when programs aren’t meeting their objectives. In practice, the evaluators we have worked with are crucial to program design and building accountability into programs through data analysis and evaluation frameworks. Good Shepherd is constantly looking for ways to better serve the community, and watching evaluators asking how programs could work better for clients has shaped how we approach our own work. We have seen that the relationship between practitioners and evaluators is cyclical: practice wisdom and client experience inform evaluation, and evaluation findings in turn strengthen both practice and policy. 

Our placement has taught us not to stop asking questions after the first answer, but to treat each answer as an opportunity to explore the patterns in research and why they occur, drawing on what practitioners, participants and the data each can tell us. 

What our placement taught us: Bringing different forms of knowledge together 

This placement has allowed us to centre the experiences of people directly affected by policy decisions, and to see how evaluators and practitioners treat clients with respect and create positive change through continuous reflection. Across all three experiences, the same lesson kept recurring: no single form of knowledge is enough on its own. Academic foundations, practice wisdom, lived experience and evaluation evidence each fill gaps the others leave, and policy is strongest when all of them are heard. The dominant lens through which we consume stories about domestic and family violence often leaves little room for women’s autonomy. Our time at Good Shepherd has highlighted women’s strength in advocating for themselves and saying what they need from a service. 

Authors: Isabela Pantos (She/Her) University of New South Wales – Bachelor of Laws and Social Science, and Jessica Fell (She/Her) University of New South Wales – Bachelor of Media and Social Science 

Content moderator: Dr Sophie Kedzior, Senior Research and Evaluation Analyst, Policy Advocacy & Service Impact, Good Shepherd Australia New Zealand