Introduction

In our Research Centre for Social Innovation, which is part of Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (the Netherlands), we are developing ways to involve service users in education and research in the field of social work. There are several reasons for this development. Firstly, we believe in the value of social inclusion. Since social workers promote ‘social cohesion based on principles of social justice, human rights, and respect for diversity’, according to the international definition (IFSW and IASSW, 2014), social workers by default contribute to social inclusion. We believe that students should not only be taught theories about social inclusion but should also experience what inclusion and exclusion mean in the daily lives of service users. This means that stories of people experiencing exclusion should be part of education. The second reason is that the best way to hear stories and to acquire understanding about discrimination and stigmatisation is to listen directly to people with these experiences and engage in dialogue. Therefore, we invite people into the classroom, or vice versa, the students into the places where people live. We often use the tandem model developed in Flanders by Driessens and others (Driessens and Van Regenmortel, 2006; Vansevenant et al, 2008) for working together with people with mild intellectual disabilities. We also use gap-mending principles as developed in Sweden and throughout the PowerUs network (Heule et al, 2017; Askheim et al, 2018;).1 More and more we use the experiences of students themselves; for instance, their experiences with illness, impairment or family care. We do this, for example, in a peer-supported recovery course for students with mental health experiences (Karbouniaris and Wilken, 2019), and in our learning teams, small groups of students form a learning and support group throughout the programme (Van Slagmaat and Karbouniaris, 2020). Social work students (and professionals in the field) need to learn how to engage in an equal partnership to be able to work together on well-being, recovery and participation (Wilken and Den Hollander, 2019). The best way to learn about partnership is to create ‘inclusive learning environments’. By doing this, we can not only improve the quality of our education but also the quality of our research.