Poverty Simulations in Social Work Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Feb 5, 2022 | 2 comments

As many of you may already know, simulations are increasingly being incorporated into social work education in various ways (online, in-person, virtual or augmented reality, large-scale, standardized patient, OSCE (Objective structured clinical exams), formative assessment, etc.). In addition, simulations often cover a range of topics such as child welfare home visits, assessment skills, and interprofessional teamwork. The goal of a simulation is to offer students an alternative or mock situation of a real one to meet specific learning outcomes. Reasons for using simulations range from assessing student competency, wanting to offer unique learning experiences to students (i.e., practice assessing for suicidality), and needing to shift instruction to virtual settings (i.e., think moving field hours out of community-based settings). 

I have worked on several projects that integrate simulations into our BSW and MSW programs at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where I work. One of the most successful has been the use of poverty simulations at our institution. In this blog post, I share why and how we implement poverty simulations, offering guidance for those wanting to add this active learning experience to their curriculum.

Why Poverty Simulations? 

Many universities have adopted the Poverty simulation to help their students understand what it is like to live in poverty beyond reading a book or watching a movie, with the ultimate goal of inspiring students to address the problem of poverty through their respective disciplines. At UAB, approximately 400 students from medicine, nursing, dentistry, social work, criminal justice, and other majors participate in a poverty simulation each semester, facilitated by numerous faculty and staff from those same disciplines. Recently, several of the faculty came together to reflect on our reasons for requiring our students to participate in a poverty simulation. We did two things – we read dozens of reflection papers written by students after attending the simulation, and then, we sat around a table to talk about our own experiences with the simulation. From these experiences, we wrote two articles that summarize the reasons why poverty simulations offer a transformational learning experience:

• Hitchcock, L.I.,   McKenzie, C.T., Register, S., Brown, M., Peterson, D.T., Holt, R. L., and White, M.L.       (2021).  Why we want our students to learn about poverty: Sharing our students’ experiences from poverty simulations.  Health Communications. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2021.1950299

• Brown, M., Hitchcock,   L.I, Peterson, D.T, Register, S., McKenzie, C.T., Holt, R.L. & White, M.L.      (2021).  Why  we want our students to learn about poverty: Sharing our own experiences from poverty simulations.  Health Communications. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2021.1950298

Briefly, we reflect in these articles that the poverty simulations offer our students (with and without lived experiences of poverty) an opportunity to actively learn about and discuss poverty with students from across campus, not just in their majors. It has also allowed faculty from across campus to learn from each other and our students about how poverty, how it affects our communities, and how our different professions can work to address the systemic problems of poverty better.

What are the Poverty Simulations? 

Created by the Missouri Community Action Network, the poverty simulation is a large-scale simulation designed to raise awareness and change attitudes toward poverty.   The simulation accommodates about 80 participants assigned to the role in one of 26 different families who live in the town of Realville. The participants must get through a month (represented by four periods of 15 minutes) by paying bills, going to work or school, and interacting with various community providers (health care clinic, mortgage company, grocery store, bank, and pawnshop) while using provided identification documents, imitation currency, and transportation passes. In addition, we offer small group debriefs with our students led by faculty and staff from across campus following the simulation. Finally, we facilitate discussion about what students learned from the poverty simulation and how to take their learning into their professional lives during these sessions. 

Additionally, we have added an interprofessional component to the simulations by putting students from different degree programs into the “family” teams. For example, nursing, medicine, and social work students might be matched together in a three-person family in the poverty simulation. While this gives them the chance to meet students from other professions, we have found that they learn about how other professions address poverty in the small group debrief sessions after the simulation.

Since 2015, we have facilitated about five poverty simulations each semester, and in Fall 2020, we started using the SPENT platform to facilitate virtual simulations. I would estimate that we have facilitated almost 100 poverty simulations over the past six years. We learned a few things about facilitating large-scale simulations and developed curricular guides during that time. You can read more about how we implement the poverty simulations on our campus in this article:

• Peterson, D. T., Hitchcock, L.I., Holt, R.L., Brown, M. R. & White, M.L.  (2021). Implementing a Large Scale Interprofessional   Poverty Simulation.  Journal of Social Work Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2021.1957736      

We also created an Educator’s Guide to help faculty on our campus incorporate the poverty simulation into their courses and programs:

• Peterson, D.T, Hitchcock, L.I, Debiasi, L.B, Shipman, S. Varley, A. & White, M. L. (2017).  Educator Resource Guide for Poverty Simulations.  In Council on Social Work Education (Ed.), Curricular Guide for Economic Well-Being Practice (p.57).  Alexandria, VA: CSWE Press.

How do Poverty Simulations support student learning outcomes?

We have formally assessed student learning outcomes from students who participate in the poverty simulation, focusing on changes in thinking and attitudes toward poverty. Here is a summary of our findings:

• Overall, the poverty simulation changed students understanding of what it is like to live in poverty and empathy for people who experience poverty.  This included students across all majors and students who had previous course content related to poverty.
• Students from all majors reported shifts in their thinking about the causes of poverty, from personal deficiencies to societal factors.
• We found a complex interaction when looking at students’ race and gender with respect to learning from the poverty simulation.  White women and African American men who participated in the poverty simulation reported a more significant shift in their thinking about poverty (viewing it more as a societal problem than an individual issue) compared with African American women and white men.  It is challenging to say the cause of these differences, but it does suggest the need for more research to understand how the intersectionality of race and gender influences learning from the poverty simulation.

You can read more details about these findings in the following articles:

• Hitchcock, L.I, Peterson, D.T., Debiasi, L., Shipman, S., Varley, A, & White, M.L. (2018). Learning About Poverty Through Simulation: A Pilot Evaluation.  Journal of Social Work Education, 54(3), 517-531.  https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2018.1434427

• Hitchcock, L.I., McKenzie, C.T., Shipman, S., Varley, A., Pollio, W., Peterson, D.T., King, D.M. & White, M.L. (2021).  Interprofessional Simulation for Understanding Poverty.  Clinical Simulation in Nursing, (52), 9-16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecns.2020.12.002

More informally, I observed hundreds of students participate in the poverty simulation and facilitated dozens of simulations and small group debriefing. Based on this experience, I believe that the poverty simulation offers a significant learning experience for students with little understanding of living in poverty. It allows them to experience the stressors of poverty and walk away with more empathy toward people living in poverty. For students with a lived experience of poverty, I have mostly seen two responses. First, some students voluntarily share their experiences with their peers, primarily to educate or process their experiences. For example, some students have expressed a newfound appreciation for the experience of their parents or childhood caregivers who raised them while dealing with poverty. The other response is that students do not speak of their lived experiences with poverty. We respect these boundaries throughout the poverty simulation and explicitly integrate psychological safety and resources into the simulation.

If you are interested in learning more about poverty simulations, please contact me at lihitch@uab.edu. We are willing to share what we have learned and know more about how others incorporate the poverty simulation in their programs.

How to cite:

Hitchcock, L.I. (2022, February 5). Poverty Simulations in Social Work Education. Teaching & Learning in Social Work. https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2022/02/05/poverty-simulations-in-social-work-education/