Teaching Note—Ask the Audience: Using Student Response Systems in Social Work Education

Social work educators are uniquely tasked with balancing content while helping students evaluate personal biases and develop ethical conduct necessary for social work professionalism. Social work education may benefit from technology like Student Response Systems (SRS) that allow educators to pose questions on sensitive topics in real time while simultaneously eliciting students' anonymous responses and leading discussion. This article reviews literature on SRS, also known as “clickers,” and presents findings from a survey regarding the use of SRS in a BSW-level social policy class. A model is presented to guide educators in their decisions to incorporate SRS into the classroom, and implications for social work education are discussed.     

Beyond PowerPoint™: Using Learning Objects to Enhance Social Work Courses

Faculty use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in social work courses has the potential to transform social work education, including increasing student engagement and accommodating different learning styles. Learning objects are reusable digital resources with a pedagogical purpose that may be used in online, hybrid, or face-to-face social work courses to achieve these and other pedagogical benefits. This article defines and provides an overview of the concept “learning objects.” Guidelines for locating and incorporating existing learning objects and for creating learning objects for use in social work courses are detailed. Finally, examples are provided.     

Response to “A Theoretical Framework”

Abstract

The outcome of social work intervention is often some rearrangement of valuable resources—money, services, power, status—in a family, neighborhood, or community. However, this redistributional effect of social work intervention and the related ethical implications have been largely unexplicated. This paper discusses the nature of distributional questions, examines three alternative approaches to the ethics of distribution—1) classical utilitarianism, 2) intuitionism, and 3) Rawls' “Theory of Justice”—and reviews the criticisms of each. The paper concludes that elements of each of these approaches can apply to social work education and practice and can help guide practitioners to higher levels of ethical consciousness.     

Response to “Becoming Visible: The Case of Collette”

The clinician’s experiences of race outside of the treatment room contribute to the formation of a racialized self, which influences clinical work with all clients notwithstanding race. Multiracial individuals at times must balance their external physical presentation—and the corresponding race-related categories that others place on them—with their own internally constructed racial identifications. The mechanisms of identification and disidentification can provide safety for the multiracial individual. How can clinicians effectively acknowledge their own identifications and disidentifications as lenses for seeing the multiracial person’s racialized self and selves so as to more effectively work with the multiracial?     

Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Using Dynamic Systems Theory to Understand “Stress and Coping” and “Trauma and Resilience”

Although research is beginning to capture the complex interactions of biopsychosocial variables operating within experiences of stressors and trauma, the bodies of research have remained largely separate and limited. This study describes a scaffold of factors and pathways based on principles from dynamic systems theories (DST) to organize the literatures on stress and coping and trauma and resilience. As a process model, DST provides the language to understand both impact and response to stressors and trauma: not as a list of symptoms but as interactive processes within persons and between persons and their surroundings.     

Preconceiving Life: Response to Gentile’s “Troubling Temporalities”

When behavior is reported that objectively places the patient and others at risk and subjectively exposes the therapist to a vivid range of private experience, the challenge in maintaining a clinical stance is complicated to say the least. This complication is intensified to the degree that the clinician's aim involves understanding rather than discipline and control. To specify details of that challenge, I discuss two patients whose unsafe sexual practice confronted me. In these clinical situations, I found it useful to be mindful that bareback sex contains a range of meanings, including the search for a quality of relating that can enliven an inner deadness. Thinking this, I found it necessary to be alert to wishes for creativity as well as destructiveness. Attending to such paradoxes also required me to come up with a new way of working with countertransference: to render it an imaginary theatrical performance.     

Response to commentary on “cues to care: future directions for ecological landscapes”

Urban Ecosystems - This commentary is in response to “Commentary on Cues to Care: future directions for ecological landscapes” (Nassauer 2020) that stated there were “errors and...     

Education: the First Step to Equality

IN the 1950s, 16 million Chinese women who hadn't even been able to read their own names learned to read 2,000 Chinese characters and to write simple letters. By attending literacy class they learned enough to be able to read popular literature. They were no longer illiterate.     

Using Textual Prompts to Teach Mands for Information Using “Who?”

Recent research on teaching mands for information to children with language deficits has focused on manipulating establishing operations (EOs). However, only a few of those studies have programmed both EO conditions (in which information is needed) and abolishing operation (AO) conditions (in which information has already been provided) to ensure functional use of the mand for information. Shillingsburg, Bowen, Valentino, and Pierce (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 47, 136–150, 2014) provided a successful demonstration of differential responding between EO and AO conditions demonstrating control of the response by the relevant EO. Echoic prompts resulted in successful mands for information “Who?” One limitation of this study was that the participants did not re-issue the initial mand upon approaching the named adult to retrieve the item. This may be problematic in the natural environment as it is unlikely that the named adult would know what the child was looking for. The current study sought to replicate and expand previous research by using textual prompts to teach the mand “Who?” in four children diagnosed with autism (Phase 1) and by requiring the mand for the item be re-issued upon approaching the named adult (Phase 2). Textual prompts resulted in differential use of the mand for information during EO and AO conditions for all of the participants. Additionally, three of the four participants who did not re-issue the mand to the named adult during the Phase 2 baseline did so following the intervention. Overall, results support the use of textual prompts to teach mands for information to children with autism.

     

Path to Poverty Alleviation: Marriage or Postsecondary Education?

We examined the role of human capital in determining economic well-being and marital status of mothers with children. We analyzed 1996 data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a nationally representative survey of 36,700 American households conducted by the Census Bureau. The results indicate that among the human capital variables postsecondary education significantly improves the economic well-being of mothers irrespective of their marital status. Also, educated mothers are more likely to be married. These findings are especially relevant as we debate the importance of marriage in poverty alleviation.

Teaching Mands for Information Using “Why” to Children With Autism

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - Mands for information (MFIs) play an important role in language development and are important for successfully acquiring new information from one’s...