#APM16 Day 4 – A Toolkit for Social and Digital Media Policies in Field Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Nov 6, 2016

It is the last day of CSWE’s 2016 Annual Program Meeting in Atlanta, and I am presenting with one of my favorite UA colleagues, Allison Curington, at 10:00 AM in Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel International 8. We will be talking about a project that we have been working on for the past year, a Toolkit for Social and Digital Media Policies in Field Education.   Allison and I started collaborating on this toolkit after many, many conversations about the growing use (and misuse) of social media in field education by students, educators and field supervisors.  We saw that field directors were increasingly dealing with ethical and practical issues related to the use of social and digital media in field education, and we wanted to provide information and tools to help field directors raise awareness with students and field supervisors.

In our interactive workshop today, we plan to present on the toolkit for the first time and pilot one of the tools – Social Media Policy Checklist and Worksheet for Social Workers. We hope you will join us.

My Guidelines for using Digital & Social Tech in the Classroom and Beyond

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Feb 12, 2016

I recently started collaborating with a good colleague, Allison Currington of the University of Alabama’s School of Social Work, on a project to develop tools and resources for social work field educators about the professional use of social media in social work practice.  After several conversations, we realized we need to walk the walk, if we are going to talk the talk. So, we each decided to take a little journey to explore our own guidelines for using social media in the classroom and in our practice as social work educators.  Our end goal is to encourage social work students and field instructors to develop their own professional social media guidelines.

I started by reviewing what was others were saying about personal social media policies and practices.  I reviewed several policies, infographics (such as Social Worker’s Guide to Social Media from the University of Buffalo’s School of Social Work), articles, blog posts with recommendations (such as Dr. Julie Hank’s post), and even my own syllabi.   What follows is a set of guidelines that represent my own practices for using digital and social technologies as a social work educator.  I would love to hear your comments about these guidelines and would be very interested in any other social workers, students and educators who would be willing to share their own best practices or guidelines for using digital and social media.

Dr. Laurel Hitchcock’s Guidelines for using Digital & Social Technology in the Classroom and Practice

These guidelines outline how I strive to interact with students, colleagues and other professionals when using digital and social media.  Digital devices are laptops, tablets, smart phones and any form of wearable technology. Social media are websites and applications that allow people to create and share content and/or participate in social networking.  

Is social media “creeping” into field education?

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Oct 22, 2014

Social and digital media are creeping into social work practice. This is how Mishna and her colleagues (2012) describe the development of online communication technologies in social work practice (including the use of email, texting and social networking sites such as Facebook).  In their qualitative study, they interviewed 15 licensed social work practitioners about their use of online communication tools with clients and discovered that social and digital media tools appear to be changing how social workers interact with clients, for better or worse.  One of the more significant themes they reported was that digital communication is being driven by client need/demand and that ethical boundaries may be crossed before a social worker even realizes what happened.

If social media and other online communication tools are creeping into social work practice at the agency and community levels, then it must also be creeping into social work field education. How? And more importantly, how are we as a profession managing it in field education? I don’t teach social work field education, but I am always interested in how my courses inform and help students transition to field education during their last semester of BSW education. Specifically, I want to understand how social and digital media are becoming a part of field education and how are students, field educators and field agencies using these tools.

For the past few semesters, I have incorporated a Twitter assignment into my macro practice course which students in our program take the semester before their field placement.  Every semester I observe how they carry their newfound knowledge and skills with social media into their field agencies.  I recently wrote an article for the Field Educator about these observations, which range from deleting their Twitter account to creating and managing a Twitter account for their field placement agency. While I am a sample size of one, I talk with field educators every chance I get, asking what they are doing with social media.  Recently, one field director told me she had her students ask their field instructors about the agency’s social media policy (a statement about who can post what on social media related to the agency) on the first day.  If the agency doesn’t have a social media policy, then the students were required write a  social media policy for the agency and present it to senior management as part of their learning contract.  She said it has been a very successful task for both the students and their field agency partners. We also talked about the possibility of students writing their own social media policies, a statement that looks a lot like informed consent where a student articulates when, how, where and why they will or will not interact with clients or communities via social media.  This step helps the students articulate their ethical boundaries in advance, before they find themselves in the middle of an ethical dilemma with a client or agency and not sure how they got there.