Rate My Professor Andrew Rudolph

Andrew Rudolph serves as a Professional Practice Fellow in the Social and Community Work Programme, School of Social Sciences, Division of Humanities at the University of Otago. He holds a Bachelor of Social Work with Honours (BSW Hons). In his teaching role, Rudolph coordinates SOWK111 Working with People: The New Zealand Context, a foundational paper utilising thirteen two-hour lectures and twelve one-hour tutorials with two tutorial groups for Pacific students, suitable for first-year Bachelor of Social Work and Bachelor of Arts students. He also coordinates SOWK201 Fields of Practice, a compulsory paper for entry into the BSW programme that covers the knowledge and history of social services in Aotearoa New Zealand. Additionally, he co-coordinates SOWK552 Child and Family Social Work and SOWK302 Social Work for Children and Families with Emily Keddell, each featuring a one-day workshop followed by two-hour lectures and one-hour tutorials.

Rudolph's research centres on child protection, collaborative decision-making, and state-community partnerships to address inequities, particularly for Indigenous peoples. He is affiliated with the Social and Community Work Programme at Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, Dunedin. As a co-author, he contributed to conceptualization, data collection, formal analysis, and writing review and editing for the 2026 journal article Shifting Power at the Front Door: State–Community Decision-Making Partnerships in Child Protection, published in Social Sciences (vol. 15, issue 1, article 5). The paper evaluates a shared decision-making forum in Aotearoa New Zealand where a Māori community organisation and statutory agency collaborate on initial child protection reports to enhance information quality with local knowledge and respond to closed cases. Enablers include policy support for community devolution, shared aims, strong relationships, and community investment; challenges encompass worker reluctance, unclear processes, and authority conflicts. He also co-authored the 2025 report He Autaki Hou: Collaborative decision-making at child protection's front door. Of Te Rawara/Ngāpuhi descent, Rudolph guest lectured in 2023 on the role of land as a pillar of the Māori health system in the School of Surveying's SURV206 paper. His work supports the programme's emphasis on human rights, social justice, and self-determination in social work.