Becoming an awesome adjunct professor in social work

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 23, 2019

Editor’s note: Patricia (Trish) Desrosiers, PhD, LCSW, is an associate professor of social work and the Chair of the Department of Social Work at Western Kentucky University.  Her research interests include social work education and leadership for social work practice.  In this blog post, Trish shares how she encourages social work practitioners to become adjunct instructors in her Department. She tweets at @DrD_Empowers.‏

As chair of the Department of Social Work, recruiting adjunct instructors is a big part of my job and the first thing that I tell a prospective adjunct is “Social Work needs you!” According to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), in 2017, over half of all social work educators in the US were adjunct instructors.  One reason is that as university budgets decline, one way to save money is to increase part-time faculty utilization. Another reason is that part-time instructors bring their practice experience into the classroom, making book content come alive for students.  As a result, program directors are constantly seeking out well-qualified faculty members in order to maintain quality educational programming. However, strong part-timers are hard to find. If you have ever considered teaching in social work, now is the time to commit to giving back to the profession. There are many reasons to do so.

#SWDE 2019 – Imagining Social Work Education into the Future: Skills for Social Justice in a Technology-Mediated World

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 13, 2019

On April 11th, Melanie Sage, Ellen Belluomini, and I presented at the 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX on a topic that is beginning to get some traction in social work – the future of social work education for practice with technology. Technology is profoundly shaping the world, especially in the delivery of education. Concurrently, services like telehealth, predictive analytics, and technology aids (i.e. Fitbits, apps and home listening devices) affect service delivery. Given these changes, how do social workers promote social justice and support privacy and equity? And consider needs of the vulnerable while harnessing technology for good?  How does social work redefine the profession in the face of algorithmic solutions to human problems? Our goal was to introduce a dialogue about what’s happening, where are gaps in social work education, and how programs might reinvent in a rapidly-changing environment.

If you were not all to make the session or didn’t attend the conference, we are sharing information from the presentation, to make the content more accessible to all and to help promote more discourse among social workers about the future of the profession.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

#SWDE2019 Keynote – What role will Social Workers choose in shaping the digital future?

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 13, 2019

On April 10th, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and I delivered a keynote speech at the 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference in San Antonio, TX. We asked social work educators to imagine a world where social workers were innovators with technology. Our goal was to have a conversation and share how we had been talking about technology will writing our book – Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology.

We started our conversation about how social workers could help close the digital justice gap on Twitter, moving from virtual spaces to physical spaces. Many social workers joined in this conversation along the way. We talked about a range of issues from boundary and privacy challenges to accessibility and connection with technology. As Nancy said, “we were near-sighted as a profession. We need to look through the lens of possibilities, not the lens of our fears.”

In this blog post, we are sharing highlights, references, and slides from the keynote. We hope you will help us continue the conversation together and in your places of work and community.

#SWDE2019 – A Toolkit for Social and Digital Media Policies in Field Education

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 11, 2019

It is the second day of the 2019 Social Work Distance Education Conference and at 10 AM, I’ll be in the Peraux Room of the St. Anthony Hotel to share our poster about the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators. This is a project I have been working on with Allison Curington (University of Alabama), Mary Jacque Carroll (University of Alabama at Birmingham),and Robin Snider (Jacksonville State University). The poster will provide both information and tools that field directors can use to guide curricular development of learning approaches and assessment strategies to achieve practice outcomes. Participants will learn how to access the Social Media Toolkit for Field Educators, a free resource with educator’s guide and a PowerPoint slide deck.

If you can’t make it to the poster, I am included all the important details in this blog post.