Implementing Service Learning Labs across a Social Work Curriculum

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Sep 29, 2015

Today, D. Scott Batey and I are presenting at the 16th Annual Conference of the Engagement Scholarship Consortium at Penn State about our work with service learning labs in the social work curriculum at UAB.  In this workshop, we will describe how we developed and implemented the service learning labs to date, discussing lessons learned from our planning process.  We hope to provide a model that participants can apply to their own institutions, and will share the next steps for our project, including implementation and assessment of the service labs.  Additionally, there will be time for participants to brainstorm with the presenters and each other. The learning objectives for this session include:

1. Understand strategies to plan & engage multiple partners in developing a community-based service learning project to support student & community outcomes.

2. Demonstrate how educators can duplicate the planning process for curriculum-based service learning projects at their institutions.

3. Appreciate the role of professional collaboration in the planning and development of service learning projects across a curriculum.

You can access a copy of the slides for the workshop PPT Slides for ESC Presentation.

Finally, here is the abstract for our presentation, titled Implementing Service Learning Labs Across a Social Work Curriculum:

Service learning has become an important component of higher education.  In addition to building community investment among a new generation of emerging adults, service learning increases community capacity to meet the many and varied local challenges.  These activities are closely aligned with the professional values of social work and social work education, and graduates of one undergraduate social work program have consistently voiced a desire for more practice opportunities.  To respond to these issues, we began a strategic planning process for integrating service learning into the professional curriculum.

Online Toolkit for developing a Personal Learning Network with Twitter

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Sep 3, 2015

One of the benefits of having an online presence is making connections with professionals from all over the world. I met Dorlee Michaeli, MBA, LMSW over Twitter a year or so ago. She created and manages Social Work.Career, a blog that provides a variety of resources to help advance an individual’s social work career  for current students or  experienced mental health professionals. In addition to career-related resources, there are interviews, key learnings from conferences/workshops, licensure exam tips, self-care guidance and more for life-long learning as a social work professional.

This summer, we created online toolkits for social work educators based on our blogs. Dorlee’s toolkit, Social Work Career’s Online Toolkit for the Social Work Educator, showcases several blog posts from Social Work.Career that will help prepare undergraduate or graduate social work students become more prepared for a career in social work.  Also included with the toolkit are some possible classroom assignments/tasks. We tip our hat to Ellen Belluomini who wrote this blog post; she was our inspiration for creating the exercises to meet the 2015 CSWE Social Work Competencies.

Here is my toolkit about developing a personal learning network (PLN) with Twitter:

A personal learning network (PLN) offers social workers and students a practical tool to stay current and share information about latest professional news, practice knowledge, and cutting-edge research findings.  I recently wrote about how a social worker can set-up a PLN using professional accounts on different social media platforms.

My favorite social media platform for my own PLN is Twitter, and this post offers tips for using Twitter effectively to maintain and engage with your PLN.  All of these tips come from my blog, Teaching & Learning in Social Work, which focuses on teaching and learning in social work.  While some of the original posts focus on the social work classroom, the practices and content can be easily adapted by any social work practitioner for their own use with a PLN.  Here are eight great ideas for using Twitter with your PLN: