Utilization of the interprofessional education,practice, and research model in HBCU social work education

ABSTRACT

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are often overlooked as a resource to address the need for a diverse healthcare workforce even though they are an essential component of ensuring diversity. In order to meet the needs of the current patient population, HBCUs’ social work programs must move from silo education, practice, and research pedagogy to inter-professional education (IPE), practice (IPP), and research (IPR) modalities when developing partnerships that promote the elimination of health disparities. This article discusses the contributions of a HBCU’s School of Social Work to the growth of IPE, IPP, and IPR utilizing the Ujima principle of Nguzo Saba. The projects developed were an attempt to provide meaningful and relevant education to social work students while exposing them to a collaborative inter-professional education, practice, and research experience. The three social work projects included intra-university and social community collaborations and exposing students to experiential inter-professional education, practice, and experimental learning. This is an opportunity for social work students to become involved in the evolving best practices pedagogy for inter-professional education, practice, and research which social work must embrace in order to fulfill the National Association of Social Workers imperative of preparing students to work in collaborative health care teams. The expected outcomes of these inter-professional ventures reflect a HBCU’s commitment to increasing the competency in inter-professional modalities aimed at supporting, empowering, and preparing high caliber diverse graduates who will grow the future and lead the world as a diverse healthcare workforce.     

Exploring Professional Stereotypes and Learning for Inter-professional Practice: An Example from UK Qualifying Level Social Work Education

This paper explores the concept of stereotyping from UK social work students' and educators' perspectives. It discusses findings from an exploration of inter-professional practice with two cohorts of final year social work students in a UK university. The authors adapted a questionnaire to initiate discussion about inter-professional working with BA and MA students participating in a specialist child and family social work module. This paper analyses students' responses to the questionnaire and explores wider issues relating to professional stereotyping and identity, discussing the usefulness of these concepts for social work education and collaborative practice. Results suggest that student social workers held both positive and negative assumptions about specific occupations/professions (such as medicine), and that these acted as a mirror or tool for reflecting back their own views of social work identity/ies. We argue that this pedagogic exercise in identifying stereotypical assumptions about ‘others’ may encourage the building of a positive sense of ‘own’ professional identity. We further suggest that students should be encouraged to construct a core social work identity that is dynamic and responsive to changing contexts.     

Health Inequalities at the Heart of the Social Work Curriculum

Efforts to reduce the widening gap between the health and social well-being of people within and between countries have become an urgent priority for politicians and policymakers. The Rio Declaration called on governments worldwide to promote and strengthen universal access to social services and to work in partnership to promote health equity and foster more inclusive societies. This paper contributes to international debates about the role of social work in promoting social justice by reducing social and health inequalities. Despite clear commitments to promote good health, there is a notable absence of a social determinants of health perspective in international social work curricula standards. The current review of social work education in England presents a timely opportunity to integrate such a perspective in teaching and learning and to disseminate this more widely. Employing the concepts of downstream and upstream interventions, the first part of the paper examines the distinctiveness of the social work contribution to this global agenda. In the second part of the paper, we consider how the content of learning activities about health inequalities can be incorporated in international social work curricula, namely, human rights, using Gypsy and Traveller families as an exemplar, inter-professional education and international perspectives.     

Local Experts in the Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies

Research into the adoption and use of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) pays increasing attention to social context; however, the social fabric of contexts of use is often poorly theorized. This paper presents an investigation into the formation and operation of informal local networks of collaboration and knowledge exchange. It highlights the role of local experts in sustaining these informal networks and helping individuals and groups adopt and cope with new ICTs. The paper draws on a range of analytic traditions, including domestication and consumer research, to assess how local experts transfer knowledge, ideas of use and even new technologies across social networks and across the boundaries between home, work and education and other domains of life. The methodology deployed attempts to overcome the limitations of many studies of the adoption and diffusion of innovations in sample selection, especially the inclusion of non-adopters. It addresses the social dynamics of engagement with new technologies and proposes a move beyond a simple individualistic adopter/non-adopter model, with consequent implications for understanding digital inclusion and exclusion.     

Achieving Collaborative Competence through Interprofessional Education. Lessons Learned from Joint Training in Learning Disability Nursing and Social Work

The ability to work interprofessionally is widely regarded as essential to professional education and training for social work. The changing contexts of social work practice and the requirement for integrated working are regular reminders of the need for social work students to develop collaborative competence. Guidance preceding the development of the social work degree emphasised that social work students should undertake specific learning and assessment in partnership working and information sharing. This suggests that aspects of interprofessional education are relevant to the teaching and development of social work students if graduates are to successfully engage in complex practice.

This paper seeks to identify the competencies needed for successful collaboration. It then draws on evaluative research of joint training programmes in learning disability nursing and social work in England to discuss the unique experiences and perspectives of graduates whose social work training was exceptionally interprofessional. The paper will discuss how some of the findings from this research can indicate lessons for promoting collaborative competence in singly trained social work students. It will argue that interprofessional learning opportunities are one of the key ingredients for the development of critical practice.     

The Right Tools for the Right Job: Social Work Students Learning Community Development

The place of community development within social work varies across nations and time. The tensions in the 1970s in the UK gave way to decades when social work has been dominated by issues relating to protecting and caring for individuals. We now have a resurgence of community development activity, bringing together varied disciplines such as urban planning and health promotion as well as social work. Within the UK there are now requirements for community development knowledge and skills within qualifying social work training. This paper reflects on experiences in promoting community development practice learning in social work qualifying placements within Health and Social Care Trusts in Northern Ireland. Issues are raised about the diversity and complexity of expectations on qualifying training, and the challenges that face universities, colleges and employing organisations in developing practice learning in this curriculum area. The prospects for improving community development learning within both qualifying and post qualifying education and training are considered particularly in the light of inter-professional and inter-organisational initiatives that put community development in the context of health promotion, housing, crime, poverty and other social issues that might be addressed at community level to improve the health and social well-being of citizens.     

A menu for learning: a World Café approach for user involvement and inter-professional learning on mental health

Inter-professional learning (IPL) initiatives and service user involvement are well established in professional education programmes, but are seldom incorporated in the same teaching and learning project. In order to accomplish a combination of these approaches, an interactive learning format, styled as a World Café on mental health, was chosen to bring social work and mental health nursing students together with service users and carers. The project aimed to be participatory and inclusive from the outset, establishing a steering group with staff, students and user/carer volunteers to plan the day-long event. The event enabled all participants to engage in round table conversations to learn from each other's outlooks and roles, and for students to reflect on their future inter-professional practice and engagement with service users. Findings from this project indicate that the World Café as a teaching and learning method may have much to offer students engaged in IPL activities. We believe that the findings from this project can contribute to the advancement of existing knowledge regarding IPL and user involvement, and that a World Café approach may serve as a template for replication for other education providers, as part of a wider repertoire of inter-professional and service user involvement initiatives.     

Oasis in a concrete jungle: arts-informed methods in social work classrooms

This article presents a qualitative arts-informed inquiry on teaching and learning in social work education. Using arts-informed research methodology and grounded theory methodology, the research analyses ten interviews of social work educators in two Canadian provinces. This article focused on how university educators use arts-informed methods of teaching about social justice through anti-racist and decolonizing lenses; also discussed are the educators’ personal and professional transformation and development within this process. The main findings discuss the importance of creating an ‘artful’ space as a platform for experiential, embodied and emotive learning, which offers an innovative, more holistic and comprehensive way of teaching social justice. This way of teaching emphasizes personal transformation, giving space to marginalized voices and expression; as well as collective co-creation of meaning and creating practical tools for future social change. The study also touches upon challenges and gaps in using an arts-informed approach, which include student resistance to alternative ways of education, expressed specifically by racialized educators and ambiguity related to assessing artful works in an academic setting. The paper ends with recommendations for social work education.     

Boundary maintenance in support networks

Most studies of social networks, whether they are viewed as the context of stressful experiences or of supportive interactions, assume fixed network boundaries. This assumption is necessary in order to analyze structural characteristics such as network density. Actual networks, however, change over time and across situations and the assumption of fixed boundaries is inappropriate for processual questions. Examination of such changes reveals limitations in the structural analysis of social networks and points to mechanisms and strategies by which network boundaries are drawn and redrawn.     

Joint Assessment in Inter‐professional Education: A Consideration of Some of the Difficulties

This paper examines one effort to jointly assess nurses and social workers where professional as well as academic qualifications were at stake. It chronicles an attempt in a Scottish university to integrate assessment of a multi‐disciplinary academic course with assessment within the existing post qualifying framework for social work. In setting up a new course the assessment strategy was designed to meet both the course learning outcomes and the requirements of the Post Qualifying Award for social work. In looking at the tensions between different academic disciplines it is, perhaps, not surprising that this attempt at assessment across professional boundaries ran into difficulties. The context of the assessment issue and the different mechanisms used in repeated attempts to resolve the problems are examined. The tentative conclusion is that, while the inter‐professional education process is highly valued by students, there are tensions between the academic and practice assessment requirements, between different academic traditions and between understandings of reflection and how it is assessed. Mutual trust and understanding are essential to the development of inter‐professional education, including an accreditation system which is flexible enough to meet a range of needs.     

How social ties transcend class boundaries? Network variability as tool for exploring occupational homophily

The research on social network analysis established the existence of class homophily, the tendency that personal networks are homogeneous in the class sense, as one of the governing patterns. This is explained via two main mechanisms: choice homophily and induced homophily. But the literature focused less on the question how can class boundaries be transgressed and what are the channels of class heterophily. This paper explores class heterophily on Croatian data acquired through position generator, which measures social capital (resources captured in social relations) by exploring the range of different occupational positions which are accessible to an individual (extensity index). Network variability is thereby taken as proxy for class composition of personal networks. The paper concludes that that political participation and sociability enable cross-class ties, since this offers an opportunity to meet and befriend people from all walks of life; and that people on the middle of the social hierarchy have the most diverse social networks. The hypotheses that social mobility can represent a vehicle for class heterophily; and that class heterophily is more pronounced in smaller settlements, where society networks show more overlap between social circles; were confirmed only partially, and require further investigation. These findings concern class boundaries related to the notion of choice homophily. As for induced homophily, the paper concludes that here too the boundaries are not watertight, as cultural omnivores have a wider range of class contacts.     

Exploring the Family Album: Social Class Differences in Images of Family Life*

Based on an analysis of twenty family albums, this study investigates how social class affects the family's portrayal of kin and friendship networks as well as its geographical boundaries. The results suggest the visual collections of middle-class families are more likely to present a kin oriented image of family life, include friends, and portray the family as a system with broad geographical boundaries than those of the working-class. Theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed.     

What do we know the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education? An empirical case study evidencing contested engagement and transformative learning

ABSTRACT

In social work education there have been very few attempts to empirically capture and measure how professional training programmes prepare students to work with ‘race’ equality and cultural diversity issues. This paper interrogates the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education and evaluates the pedagogic relevance and practice utility of teaching social work students about ‘race’, racism and anti-racism. The data presented in this paper suggests that it is possible to discover the situated experiences of learning about anti-racism and measure how this teaching can affect and lead to knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The triangulated mixed methods evidence presented in this paper combines nomothetic and idiographic approaches with quantitative data for a matched pair sample of 36 social work students and uses non-parametric statistical tests to measure at two time intervals (before and after teaching); knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The paper explores how anti-racist social work education enables students to move from ‘magical consciousness’, where racism and racial oppression is invisible and thereby left unchallenged and maintained, to more critical and reflexive level of awareness where it is named, challenged and no longer shrouded in a culture of professional denial and silencing.     

A social work re-reading of students as consumers

The concept of student as consumer highlights significant shifts in what Canadian students pay for their education and how this transition has shaped their relationship with learning as well as their overall expectations for, and participation in, the project of higher learning. Consumerism in social work education reflects broader trends towards academic capitalism in Canadian universities and is a result of neoliberal ideology reshaping higher education. In this paper, we explore student and faculty participants’ reflections on the impact of consumerism on progressive social work education, exploring how participants use the term to make sense of their experiences and how doing so reshapes progressive social work education itself.     

Exploring the Transferability of Competency-Based Education Model to Social Work Education in Vietnam

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam (hereafter Vietnam) has made extraordinary strides in terms of economic progress during the past two decades. Such rapid economic change has also created many social problems such as poverty, family abuse, substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, and mental health problems. Vietnam has taken steps to develop workforce capacity to ameliorate such challenges by investing in social work educational programs, including participation in an international collaborative initiative, the Social Work Education Enhancement Program (SWEEP). This article describes the procedures and process of the initial stage of the development of a competency-based social work curriculum in Vietnam through SWEEP. More specifically, this paper presents the following collaborative strategies between partners in Vietnam and the SWEEP team in the United States: conducting a needs assessment; providing trainings on competency-based education (CBE) to the partners in Vietnam; and receiving feedback from the partners to grasp the challenges at the early stage of development of CBE in Vietnam. While this article focuses on Vietnam, the SWEEP project can be a reference from which to develop social work education in other countries in regard to global collaboration for development of social work curriculum based on the CBE model.     

Environmental Sustainability and Social Work: A Rural Australian Evaluation of Incorporating Eco-Social Work in Field Education

Climate change poses significant threat to the wellbeing of global society. Addressing this change has as yet generated no fixed blueprint for social work practice and education. This paper reports on a formative evaluation of one Australian initiative to address this transformative opening in social work field education. Prompted by service users' and workers' experience of the impact of drought, a rurally located social work course team amended the field education curriculum to include a focus on Environment and Sustainability. This learning goal was added to the existing learning goals derived from the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) Practice Standards. Students and field supervisors were surveyed on their experience of meeting this new learning goal. While most expressed confidence in understanding the concepts involved, they clearly lacked assurance in interpreting these in practice encounters. Considering their qualitative input suggests that this topic is making a transition from being on the margins of social work to becoming mainstream. Their open-ended responses indicate that the incorporation of environmental sustainability into practice is at a threshold stage of development. Further enactment of eco-social work at the local level is concluded to be supported by using a transformative learning framework in facilitating critical reflection and collaborative dialogue for effective change.     

Social Work within a Community Discourse: Challenges for Teaching

This paper considers the continuing debate about the relationship between social work and community work. We write about our collaboration as educators, one from a social work background and the other from a community work background and discuss the challenge of teaching community work to social work students in a way that is relevant for contemporary practice, and that embraces community work principles and values. Our paper explores Ife's framework of competing discourses of human services and discusses how it has helped us to articulate our thinking and teaching practice in the Irish context. For us, the framework integrates social work and community work within a community discourse that provides a language transcending disciplinary boundaries. This approach represents a means of familiarising students with the community work process and enabling them to take action on issues of social justice. The framework represents four competing models of human service delivery: the managerial, the market, the professional and the community. We discuss how we use this conceptualisation to teach and engage students in a process of critical reflection. The paper discusses methods we use to undertake this process, and the development of our teaching practice over the last two years.     

Social Work Student Learning Experiences of Family Therapy: Improving Competency in Pedagogy Through Qualitative Research

The purpose of this qualitative study is to evaluate graduate social work student experiences of pedagogy intended to improve competency in family therapy practice. Students from two classes (N = 37) completed open‐ended surveys assessing: perceptions of most helpful pedagogical practices; understanding of needed competencies; and perceived opportunities offered to them during their graduate training for learning about work with couples and families. Results, analysed using grounded theory methodology, revealed that students: (1) believed that experiential activities were especially critical for learning how to do clinical practice with couples and families; (2) understood important competencies related to professional development, therapeutic engagement with the family, and how to approach family practice; and (3) believed they were ‘somewhat prepared’ for practice. Implications include improving understanding of abstract skills in practice with couples and families, and emphasising relationship dynamics more in graduate social work education and training.     

Teaching social work students to speak up

It takes courage to defend your values or boundaries in the face of emotional and social risks. Social work advocacy, relationships, resilience and education all rely on the ability to engage in ‘difficult conversations’, defined as dialogue to defend personal values or boundaries in the face of potential social or emotional risks. Yet, students often speak of feeling scared, unskilled and prone to instinctive response patterns when trying to speak up, making the question of how we can teach moral courage an important and understudied area of pedagogical research. In this article, we describe a Canadian pilot study to develop and evaluate learning activities developed for an undergraduate social work practicum seminar course to help students to speak up. We describe the key elements of the learning activities co-developed with students, and outline the SPEAKER model which resulted from the study as a way of helping students to assess, safely engage in and experience success with, these difficult conversations. Drawing on the concepts of embodied learning, the pedagogy of discomfort and identity theory, we suggest the value of building learning around the naturally occurring ‘difficult conversations’ faced by students in their practicum and other areas of their life.     

Inter-organisational collaboration in family-centred practice: A framework for analysis and action

Inter-organisational collaboration in the human services is challenging because of the multiple and complex nature of the inherent potential sources of conflict. In this paper, a conceptual framework is advanced for assessing the sources of conflict at five levels of analysis: (i) inter-organisational; (ii) intra-organisational; (iii) inter-professional; (iv) inter-personal; and (v) intra-personal. While yet to be systematically tested, this conceptual framework may assist practitioners, managers and policy makers in the human services to enhance collaboration across organisational and sectoral boundaries.