Virtual Volunteering for Social Work Education during COVID19

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jul 22, 2020

Each semester, I teach courses with service learning requirements in our BSW program.  As many of you know, service learning combines volunteer work with critical reflection so that students can make connections between real-life experiences and their academic course work.  It is consider a high-impact educational practice in higher education and the pedagogical constructs embedded within service learning are a natural fit for social work education.  Many undergraduate social work programs require volunteer hours for admission into their professional social work programs.  At the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), our students volunteer for 20 hours as part of a semester-long, one-credit hour lab course, which is connected to a practice course.  While volunteering in community-based settings, our BSW students get experiences with different types of agencies, social problems, client populations, and activities that social workers do on a daily basis.  Then, they bring these experiences back into the classroom to deepen their understanding of generalist social work practice with individuals, groups and organizations.  Students take three service learning lab courses prior to their field semester, which gives them a grounding for what to expect during their field placement along with 60 hours of volunteer experience for their professional development and resume. 

In March 2020, the COVID19 pandemic disrupted our lives and how we teach our courses.  Within the span of a week, I had to shift over 100 students in our three service learning lab courses from doing in-person volunteering at five community locations in the Greater Birmingham area to doing virtual volunteer work. In this blog post, I want to share how I did this and offer resources for social work educators who also need virtual volunteer opportunities for their students. 

Book Group Discussion Guide for Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Jul 2, 2020

Back in September, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and I announced a virtual book group for our work – Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology.  The goals of the book group were to: 1) create a supportive learning community; and 2) provide space for reflection about one’s own professional development with teaching with technology.  You can read more about this blog post: 

Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology Book Group

We launched our book group in January and ended it in June 2020, with monthly meetings and a moderated online private Facebook group. The group included a monthly live virtual meeting with discussion moderated by the authors and guest facilitators. Live meetings allowed members to participate and ask questions. In between these live meetings, the facilitators  led and moderated discussions about teaching with tech, offering reflective questions and simple learning tasks. Additionally, all live meetings were recorded and archived for later viewing in the group. We will leave the group up as an archive until the end of 2020.  Please know that this group will no longer be moderated.  

Overall, we had a total of 223 members in the group, and based on the group analytics there were over two hundred posts submitted, and a lot more members reviewing/reading the posts. Although we expected greater engagement, we know that this year brought unexpected challenges for all of us. We believe that good discussion prompts and questions from our facilitators promoted thoughtful reflection and engagement each month.  We are sharing these questions and prompts here in this blog post  so that others can use them for their own review or to start book groups in their institutions.  Here is the discussion guide: