Media Savvy Social Work Course

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 19, 2015

Alyssa Lotmore is the Assistant Director and Coordinator of Baccalaureate Field Education in the School of Social Welfare at the University at Albany, and the co-host of The Social Workers Radio Talk Show.  In this blog post, she discusses her media savvy social work course.  For student perspective on Ms. Lotmore’s course, read this blog post by Dottie-Jean Turenne.

When I tell my social work colleagues or students that I am a co-host of a live Social Work radio show, there is always that pause. It takes a minute for people to process the idea of a social worker using the radio as a means to advocate and raise awareness, even seasoned social workers. Typically, a degree in social work trains a practitioner to work individually with clients or organize communities. Even though coursework may briefly note that we can use media, particularly social media, to ignite change and share knowledge, there are few examples that shows us how to use such methods.

The goal of the Social Workers Radio Talk Show is to have students, faculty, and alumni on as co-hosts and guests to speak about social work trends and current practices provided by social workers. As I began to interview a variety of guests on the live show, I realized that even though they were conducting interesting research and/or had wonderful experiences to share, they struggled to translate that knowledge and expertise to the listeners in a clear, concise and engaging way. The use of social work jargon, filler words (i.e. ‘like’, ‘um’), unorganized content, and sounding flat were just a few of the issues that caused listeners to disengage. That led me to the idea of our Media Savvy Social Work Course, which teaches beneficial skills to social work students about seeing the public as the client and using the media to reach those who may never had considered seeing or using a social worker. The communication skills learned in this course are valuable to students who may never be on air. For example, when students learn to how to host a live radio show, they are learning how to speak with potential funders regarding why they should donate to an agency, effectively communicate with community members about how policies will affect them, and explain new client interventions to coworkers.

Career Building Skills for Social Workers: #MacroSW Chat 5/14 8 PM CST

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 5, 2015

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.

Making Social Policy Relevant Through Social Media

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on May 1, 2015

Dr. Casey Bohrman (@CaseyBohrman) is an assistant professor in the Department of Undergraduate Social Work at West Chester University. In this blog post, she writes about how she uses blogging tools such as Twitter and Tumblr in her social welfare policy courses to engage student in current events and practice advocacy skills.

During the winter of 2013, I frequently listened to Tell Me More, an NPR radio program focused on issues impacting people of color.  I noticed that many of the experts on the show came from the “blogosphere” or gained their standing through prolific tweeting.  Wanting my social policy class to be relevant to modern policy discussions, I decided to have students join Twitter as part of a class assignment in Spring 2014.

Because Twitter is limited to 140 characters, I also wanted students to have the opportunity to comment on social issues in a more comprehensive fashion.  Inspired by David Jaffee, a sociologist from the University of North Florida who blogs about his perspective on current socio-economic issues, I decided to have my students also create blogs. The first time I taught the class we used WordPress, as it was the site recommended to me by our librarian.  In future classes, I used Tumblr as it was more user-friendly and allowed for easier incorporation of audio-visual material.

I asked students create a Twitter account and a blog about a particular area of interest, such as mental health policy or how social policy might directly impact women.  I asked students to tweet several times per week and post a blog entry once a month about current issues in their policy area.  I also asked them to follow a range of accounts from traditional news outlets, advocacy organization, and people directly experiencing an issue.  One of the strengths of using Twitter to learn about policy is that it gives students a broader and more current perspective on an issue than they can get from a textbook.   It is particularly important for social workers to hear and learn from the perspectives of people who directly impacted by a social issue. For example, there are a number of users who identify with Black Twitter (such as @Feministajones, @Karnythia, and @TheBlackVoice) who provide important perspectives on racial issues.

Lessons Learned from #SWDE2015

Posted By Laurel Hitchcock on Apr 26, 2015

For those of you who missed the Social Work Distance Education Conference (#SWDE2015), hosted by the School of Social Work at the University of Indiana and the Council on Social Work Education, it was held almost two weeks ago (April 15-17, 2015) in Indianaplois, IN.  I spent two days at the conference, and it is clear to me that social work educators are no longer discussing if we are going to take our courses and curricula online; the question is how are we going to do it.

After spending time talking with colleagues, listening to presentations from social workers teaching all over the country and following the #SWDE2015 comments on Twitter, I have come away with three lessons learned:

1. We need an updated research agenda in social work education that focuses on evidence-based practice for teaching.  The trend to online education in social work not only raises questions about its quality and effectiveness, it should also make us re-think what we are doing in seated classrooms.  For example, how do we know that face-to-face, in-class discussion actually increase social work students’ understanding and learning?  Where is our evidence to support this time-honored teaching method in social work education? Or are we just more comfortable with it? As we begin assessing the quality of our pedagogies, we can start by questioning our own internal biases and assumptions about what is quality teaching and learning for our profession.  Is the seated classroom the best way to teach practice skills because that is how I learned practice skills or because there is evidence to support it? From there, we can begin to develop and test meaningful research questions about the effectiveness of our teaching pedagogies. So the next time, you find yourself saying out loud that we can’t do this or that in an online classroom, stop and go to the literature or your colleagues for the evidence.  If there is no evidence to be found, you have just identified your next research project.

2. We need to look and work outside our professional silos in academics. Social work education needs to turn its gaze outward.  We must look to the research being done by other disciplines as they grapple with the same opportunities and challenges of incorporating technology into their pedagogies.  Our colleagues in nursing, medicine, library sciences, counseling and teacher education are also teaching in online environments and are also assessing how to move their courses and curricula online.  Their scholarship could help inform our own educational research agenda.  We need to get out of our offices and start walking across campus to meet, talk and develop projects with other disciplines around online education. Interdisciplinary efforts and collaboration will help us get caught up with the face-paced world of online/techology-based edcuation and give us the opportunity to learn and ultimately share social work education’s unique and valuable contributions to teaching and learning in the 21st century.  My own journey as a tech-savvy educator started by collaborating with a talented librarian who showed me the power of brining social media into the classroom.

3. Finally, we need to invest more in our own professional development as educators.  Incorporating new and rapidly changing technology into seated and online classrooms requires new skills and knowledge that many of us did not learn during our own social work training.  As individual educators, we need to assess and improve our own skills with technology and online education by reading the literature, attending institutional workshops and trainings, collaborating with colleagues and taking the leap of faith to try something new with our students.  Administrators also need to support these activities and provide resources (time and money) to help us improve skills and transform content and pedagogy for online environments.  And along the way, we need to help our students, alumni, community partners, and fellow social work practitioners make the transition too.

If you are interested in learning more about the #SWDE2015 Conference, please visit the website at: http://swde.iu.edu/.  You will find a copy of the Conference Program, and my understanding is that videos and slideshows  of some presentations will be posted soon.

Or you can also review tweets from the conference in this Storify transcript.

Please feel free to post any comments or questions for this post.  I am very interested in what others have to say and continuing the conversation.

How to cite this post:

Hitchcock, L. I. (2015, April 26).Lessons Learned from #SWDE2015[Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://laureliversonhitchcock.org/2015/04/26/lessons-learned-from-swde2015/.