Learning Together In Mental Health: Co-Production of Knowledge through Lived Experience, Recovery-Oriented Practice, and Social Work Education

Background and Purpose

In recent decades, the field of mental health has shifted toward recovery-oriented, rights-based, and community-focused approaches. Central to these developments is the recognition of individuals with lived experience, and their families, as experts in their own lives and as essential sources of knowledge.

This shift is particularly significant in mental health, where historically the voices of individuals with lived experience and their families have often been marginalized or silenced within dominant medical frameworks characterized by strong power hierarchies privileging professional knowledge. Despite increasing recognition of experiential knowledge, social work education continues to rely largely on hierarchical models that do not fully reflect recovery-oriented values.

This workshop presents an innovative graduate-level course that seeks to address this gap by positioning different forms of knowledge—experiential, professional, and academic—as distinct and complementary rather than hierarchical. The course brings together social work students, individuals with lived experience of mental health challenges, and family members in a shared learning environment based on knowledge integration and co-production.

The aim of the workshop is to introduce a pedagogical approach that enables learning directly from lived experience through a collaborative process of inquiry, while critically examining how knowledge is constructed, valued, and enacted in mental health education.

Content and Pedagogical Approach

The workshop will combine brief conceptual input with experiential learning. Participants will be introduced to principles of knowledge integration and their connection to recovery-oriented practice, including self-determination, participation, and recognition of experiential knowledge as legitimate and essential.

A central component will be a structured experiential exercise reflecting the core learning process of the course. Participants will work in small groups and engage in guided inquiries around a mental health-related topic. Each participant will be invited to contribute from a different knowledge position (experiential, professional, or theoretical), enabling exploration of how diverse forms of knowledge interact.

Through facilitated dialogue, participants will formulate questions, share perspectives, and co-construct understandings. The process emphasizes mutual recognition, negotiation of meaning, and the emergence of new knowledge through interaction. This will be followed by refland discussion focusing on tensions related to power, authority, and legitimacy of knowledge, and on how such processes may challenge dominant medical paradigms.

Key Themes for Exploration

• Lived experience as a central source of knowledge in recovery-oriented practice
• Co-production and integration of experiential, professional, and academic knowledge
• Power dynamics and legitimacy of knowledge in education
• Dialogue as a process of shared meaning-making
• The potential of shared learning to challenge dominant paradigms and reshape professional identities

Implications for Social Work Education and Practice

This workshop highlights the need for social work education to move beyond hierarchical and exclusively medicalized models of knowledge, and to develop pedagogical approaches that integrate diverse sources of knowledge. By centering lived experience and fostering collaborative inquiry, such approaches promote more democratic, participatory, and socially responsive forms of learning.

Participants will gain conceptual frameworks and practical tools for implementing similar approaches, while critically reflecting on the possibilities and challenges of transforming knowledge practices in mental health education.