ABSTRACT
As qualified social workers and teachers of welfare workers, our experience was that the training courses on which we taught, and had ourselves been taught, included a critical structuralist approach to practice. Yet the teaching and practice of interpersonal communication (microskills) produced a dichotomy because they were not integrated with this critical approach. Students and teachers were often confused, being taught incongruent theoretical approaches which resulted in the situation that practitioners either ‘did’ social change or they ‘do’ interpersonal work.
