The Social Work Dimensions of Diversity Library Guide
One of my favorite parts of teaching social work is watching students discover the connections between theory and practice, especially those moments when social justice moves from abstract ideas to meaningful frameworks for understanding the world. Finding the right learning resources, such as a book, movie or podcast, to facilitate those discoveries hasn’t always been easy.
Like many of you, I’ve spent countless hours searching for materials that do more than just acknowledge diversity. I wanted resources that helped students understand how systems of power and privilege actually shape people’s lives, materials that centered the voices of those most affected by oppression. I also realized that if I, as a full-time educator, was spending a lot of time finding these resources, our adjunct faculty might be struggling too. Given that the Council on Social Work Education’s 2022 Educational Policies and Accreditation Standards (CSWE, 2022) now embeds requirements for diversity and equity content throughout social work curricula, I wanted to find a way to curate and share resources.
This idea led to an exciting collaboration with Dana Hettich, a reference librarian at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Libraries. Together with help from Lana Turner, MSW Student and soon-to-be UAB alumnus, we developed the Social Work Dimensions of Diversity Library Guide, a project that has become more than just a teaching resource. It’s evolved into a living, collaborative space where students, faculty, and librarians work together to build something meaningful.
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2018
One of the reasons I like a good “end-of-the-year list” is the opportunity to reflect on what I did and did not miss out on over the past year. I’m always thrilled to discover I read one or maybe even two of the most notable books on the New York Times yearly list. Then, I start planning my reading wish list for the coming year, which usually involves magical thinking about reading every winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature or the all the Pulitzer Prize winners for Non-Fiction from the last ten years. Even if I don’t actually read all of these books, I believe in having some goals for my reading and other activities. For the Teaching and Learning in Social Work Blog, I had three goals for 2018:
1 .Write or publish 30 blog posts
2. Increase the number of blog subscribers from 100 to 200
3. Publish 10 guest educator blog posts
Here is how those goals worked out:
1. Wrote only 13 blog posts during the year, but published a total of 21 posts (70% completed)
2. Only added 40 more subscribers to the blog (40% completed)
3. Published 8 guest educators posts (80% completed)
While not all my goals were achieved, I was still able to collaborate with others to accomplish some solid writing for the blog including information about projects that I have been working on, and all my conference presentations for the year. Below is a list of this year’s posts, grouped around the topics of projects, guest educator posts, and conference presentations.
Projects: These posts describe new projects that I started or worked on during 2018:
Three things I learned at #IPECSpring18
About two weeks ago, I attended my fourth conference of the spring semester – the 2018 Spring Institute of the Interprofessional Education Collaborative (IPEC) held in Washington, DC from April 30 – May 2, 2018. As I was flying home, I tried to reflect on what I had learned at the IPEC Conference as compared to my other three conferences from the semester. Not surprisingly, I struggled to remember the names and even locations of the other three conferences, including one that I attended in mid-April. Even now as write this post in mid-May, my memories of the IPEC conference are fading. Given all the time, energy, and resources that goes into attending a conference, I wondered about what I was learning at all of these conferences, how it was informing my work as a social work educator; and how I might be able to utilize or share my learning with others.
A quick internet search turned up a few articles about the impact of academic conferences on scientific research, professional development of individual academics, and on disciplines as a whole. A blog post by Donald Nicolson, The last great unknown? The impact of academic conferences, offers a good answer to my own questions and proposed another – How do academic conferences make a difference in the lives of academics and wider society? The short answer is we really don’t know, especially in social work education and practice. Here is a ripe research opportunity for someone with more time and energy than me. I am not looking for another research project, so feel free to let your doctoral students know about this one. I did, however, come up with a solution to my challenge of integrating what I learned at conference into my professional life as a social work educator – I should blog about every conference. Not only will I able to reflect on my conference experiences through the process of writing, blogging also lets me share my thoughts with others adding value (hopefully) for those who couldn’t attend the conference or maybe are interested in a social worker’s perspective on a conference.
So how do I go about blogging about a conference? For a few years now, I have been posting information about my own conference presentations. My structure for these post is to take my original conference session proposal, add copies of the slides or handouts, and include some information about the conference and my co-presenters, and viola, a quick and easy blog post. Here is my most recent conference blog post from the third annual Social Work Distance Education Conference in April 2018. While this is a great way to re-use that conference proposal, these blog posts are not reflective of my own learning nor do they offer professional insight about a conference as a whole. To help me write about academic conferences I went back to the internet and I found this blog post, 12 ways to write a conference blog post by Alison Bolen. She her suggestions for blogging about conferences range from a simple summary of one’s impressions from the conference to sharing a to-do list of actions and ideas that you plan to pursue following the conference. Another of Bolen’s ideas is to discuss one’s personal lessons learned, which resonated with me as the IPEC Conference was all about new ideas for me. So without further ado, here are the three most valuable things I learned about Interprofessional Education (IPE) at #IPECSpring2018:
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work Blog Posts for 2016
The end of a year is a natural time for reflection, and this year I offer a review of all the posts that appeared on Teaching & Learning in Social Work Education during 2016. My goal for this blog is to write or publish at least two posts a month, which happened more months than not. I also recruited other social work educators to write about their own experiences in the classroom or with scholarship, and also write about about all of my presentations, either at conferences or as a part of a workshop. This year, I published a total of 25 blog posts, representing work with numerous collaborators and good colleagues. Below is a list of this year’s post grouped around the topics of assignments, projects, guest educator posts, and conference presentations.
Assignments: These blog posts provide information, how-to tips, and ideas about different types of technology-based assignments for the social work classroom:
– Job Shadowing on Twitter with Joy Jones on 1/8/16
– Tweet, Tweet!: Using Live Twitter Chats in Social Work on Education with Dr. Jimmy Young on 1/29/16
– Using #MacroSW in the Classroom with the @OfficialMacroSW Partners on 3/14/16
– Using Pinterest in Undergraduate Social Work Education – #BPDTX16 with Dr. Lisa Baker on 3/31/16
– Revised Technology-Based Learning Task List for Social Work Education with Drs. Melanie Sage and Nancy J. Smyth on 6/13/16
Using Learning Wheels: The #APLOL16 Connected Conference
In this short blog, we (Amanda Taylor and Laurel Hitchcock) outline the success of the #APLOL16 Conference LearningWheel and through doing so hope to encourage social work and indeed other professions to consider this methodology as a conduit for collating and disseminating conference content.
Why a Conference Learning Wheel?
I reached out to Amanda earlier this year about setting up a Conference LearningWheel for Alabama Possible’s 2016 Lifetime of Learning Conference because I had previously participated in the development of LearningWheels for other conferences, and saw several benefits for #APLOL16. First, a Conference LearningWheel helps document learning that occurs during and after a conference. By contributing short sentences (which become spokes of the wheel), conference attendees can share their insights, feedback and comments about the different conference sessions with an audience beyond that session and even beyond the conference. Second, the LearningWheel also captures how conference attendees can best communicate with each other during or after a conference, and with others such as colleagues, students, community partners, or any like-minded person. This is ideal for encouraging conference attendees to apply what they learned in their professional settings and promote collaborations. Finally, I hope Alabama Possible can use the Conference LearningWheel as an evaluation tool to help assess the outcomes from #APLOL16 and to plan next year’s conference.
Career Building Skills for Social Workers: #MacroSW Chat 5/14 8 PM CST
Melissa Whatley, UAB Career & Professional Development
Joy Jones, UAB Career & Professional Development
This is a re-post from the #MacroSW Chat website. I will be hosting this chat on 5/14/15 so please join us! Click here for more information on how to participate in a live Twitter chat.
Are you a newly graduated social worker looking for a job? Thinking about going back to graduate school for that MSW? Then join us for a chat with guest experts Melissa Whatley & Joy Jones from the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s (UAB) Career & Professional Development. They will be answering your most pressing questions about searching and interviewing for that first social work job, how to tell your professional story through a resume, and best practices for networking, off-line & online.
We also invite social workers to share their own experiences about finding a social work job, especially a macro position, how they made the decision to go back to graduate school, or their best tip for networking, interviewing or building a resume.
Here is how the chat will work:
Melissa (tweeting from @uabcareerserve) and Joy (tweeting from @UABJoy ) will be answering your most pressing career development questions so come prepared. You can also submit your questions in advance to @laurelhitchcock. Melissa and Joy will be selecting questions from your submissions/posts. (Disclaimer: We may not be able to get to everyone’s question due to the time limit of the chat). Possible topics include:
1. What needs to be included on my resume?
2. How can I use social media to get a job?
3. What can I expect during a job interview?
4. What do I need to know to be successful in a social work career?
We also invite anyone joining our chat to share their thoughts and best career advice along side Melissa & Joy.
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
