Pinterest Assignment for the Social Work Classroom

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Sep 16, 2020

A few years back, my colleague, Dr. Lisa Baker at Samford University’s Department of Social Work, and I collaborated on a study about a technology-meditated assignment that we developed for a Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) course. Our goal was to breathe some new life into a stale assignment.  In this post, I want to share how we approached the development, assessment, and dissemination of our study related to this tech-mediated assignment.   

Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2017

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Dec 26, 2017

One of my favorite things to do at the end of the year is to read all of the “year-in-review” lists.  Books, records, movies, top ten social work journal articles – it doesn’t matter what the list is about, I’ll read it.  I am always curious how and why people choose to rank their favorite things from the year.  This must be because I find it hard to choose a favorite book or movie when there are so many good options, and how can I exclude anything as a social worker, the profession that loves diversity and strives for inclusion. So for 2017, I offer a list for the Teaching & Learning in Social Work Blog.  Not the top-ten blog posts, but the entire year.  Here are the numbers:

Number of Blog Posts in 2017 –  My goals was to write or publish at least two posts a month, which happened more months than not:

Total Blog Posts = 25
Highest number of Blog Posts published in one month = 6 (October)
Lowest number of Blog Posts published in one month = 0 (August)

Guest Educator Posts in 2017 – Another goal I have for this blog is to provide a space for others to share their work, particularly work that does not fit into the traditional academic publication venues.  For 2017,  I am thrilled that eight social work educators wrote seven different blog posts about their scholarship of teaching and learning for the blog.  I want to thank all of these authors for sharing their work and for all they do to educate future social workers!

Scholarship Dissemination Posts – My final goal for the year was to write more about my own scholarship by sharing content from conference presentations and any published articles.  I published seven posts about national conference presentations with colleagues, and wrote about one article I had published in 2017.  Clearly, I am doing more conferencing than publishing.

Below is a list of this year’s post grouped around the topics of assignments, projects, guest educator posts, and conference presentations.

Know your Social Work History: Pioneering Health Care for Children with Disabilities

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Feb 1, 2017

A little unknown fact about me – one of my first scholarly interests as a future academic was and still is social welfare history; exploring the roots of the social work profession in the United States.  As a doctoral student at the University of Alabama’s (UA) School of Social Work, I was fortunate enough to work with Dr. Paul Stuart, a leading social welfare historian and, now, Professor of Social Work at Florida International University.  I took several classes with him about social welfare policy and historical research methodology.  Along with being my academic advisor and chair of my dissertation committee, he helped me to develop an interest in how the history of social work profession has a direct and meaningful influence on today’s social workers and social welfare agencies.  Through reading and research from my course work, I quickly learned that there was a gap in the social welfare history literature on the intersection of social work and public health in early 20^th century in the United States.  Using my background in public health and social work, I developed a research topic which turned into my dissertation and the foundation of my interest in social welfare history – the history of health and social services for children with disabilities.

I write all this because I just had a second article published from my dissertation research:

Hitchcock, L. I., & Stuart, P. (2017). Pioneering Health Care for Children with Disabilities: Untold Legacy of the 1916 Polio Epidemic in the United States. Journal of Community Practice. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/BDSf39bKsz2ffnn6zMFb/full