Dr Denise MacDermott is passionate about social work education. She is committed to social justice pedagogies which place inclusivity and accessibility at the fore of her work with service users and people with lived experience, often underrepresented in social work education, as active learning collaborators in contributing to the social work curriculum at Ulster University.
Denise is the Subject Lead for Social Work (undergraduate and postgraduate) and a Senior Fellow of Advance HE. As an accomplished teacher she is committed to transforming learning and teaching by building sustainable collaborations for learning which support social work students to understand contested societies, redress power imbalances and embrace participatory approaches which emphasise social justice and human rights.
Her research brings together the voices of service users, experts by experience, practice teachers (from the voluntary and community sectors) and social work students to illuminate and amplify conversations and consider more participatory methods and mechanisms that move beyond the ‘them and us’ dichotomy.
One such example is the Shared Stories Narrative Model (2019) .This research focuses on first-year students and co-production with experts by experience from a voluntary sector agency in Northern Ireland. What emerged from this research was a wholly original, co-produced Shared Stories Narrative Model. This model is included in the Northern Ireland Social Care Council Good Practice Guidelines for involving Service Users in Social Work Education in Northern Ireland (2020).