Navigating AI in Social Work Education
Editor’s note: In this blog post, four social worker educators share a sample from their new and free resource about using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in social work education. Alexander Rubin, LCSW, is a clinical assistant professor based in field education at the University at Buffalo School of School of Social Work. He specializes in community partnership development, field-specific teaching, and innovation in field education. Michael Lynch, LMSW, is a clinical associate professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. He specializes in experiential learning, community partnerships, and the use of technology in social work practice and education. Todd Sage, Ph.D., MSW, is a clinical associate professor at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. He is the chemical dependency track coordinator and mental health track chair. He researches technology and child welfare and enjoys integrating emerging technologies in the classroom and as a field instructor. Melanie Sage, Ph.D., LCSW, is a tech consultant for universities, social work departments, and social work agencies. She is an expert in generative AI, machine learning in social work, social media use, online education, and teaching with technology. She also works with agencies to train staff in Motivational Interviewing.
As social work educators, we find ourselves at a point where the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT intersect with our professional practice more and more often, and we ponder these challenges with much philosophical debate in academic settings. But we send our students out to their practicum sites, and the debates are no longer philosophical; real-life decisions affect agencies, students, and clients, and these challenges must be thoughtfully and practically addressed. The emergence of AI has outpaced the development of comprehensive policy in numerous professional settings. This is why we wrote an article to offer guidance and considerations for the social work field educator with a student placed in their agency. Our goal is to introduce use cases, debates, and potential policies. The full article can be downloaded here and shared with your local social services agencies.
Re-Capping Teaching & Learning in SWK for 2021
One of my academic favorites is Dr. Katie Linder who produces a podcast called You’ve Got This, where she offers advice and examples for other academics as they navigate the world of higher education. Frequently, Katie talks about goal setting and how she works to accomplish her own goals. As I listened to her end-of-the-year podcast about her 2021 goals, all I could think about was my blog.
You see, every year, I set goals for this blog, and rarely do I accomplish these goals. Here is some of the evidence:
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2019
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2018
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work for 2017
Review of Teaching & Learning in Social Work Blog Posts for 2016
I even tried to set goals for the first quarter of 2020 and publish only seven blog posts. Sigh! Here they are:
Ten Ways COVID-19 Created the Perfect Storm for Social Worker Burnout (and why I still have hope)
Editor’s note: This post was written by Melanie Sage from the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She originally posted it on LinkedIn and is re-published here with her permission. This is a follow-up to her post – A Love Letter to Social Workers on the Front Lines of COVID-19. You can follow Melanie on Twitter at @melaniesage.
In April 2020, just months into the pandemic that changed the landscape of how we work and live globally, and in the face of concerted love to health workers, I wrote a love letter to social workers, the invisible heroes of the emerging pandemic. The letter spread like fire, viewed by more than 100,000 people. Many social workers resonated with the stories I shared and many people who work with social workers also expressed their gratitude for the steady dedication of social workers.
As we move into a new year, I feel called to update people about the state of affairs from my point of view. As a university professor, I do not work with clients directly. However, this past year, I have witnessed the impacts of COVID-19 on students, their families, and their clients. Despite instructors’ flexibility, we’re losing students like never before – they are leaving school, often without a word. Sometimes we hear; a family member has fallen sick or they just can’t manage homeschooling for their children, working from home, AND going to school online. Who can blame them for delaying their educational ambitions to take care of their families? For some, it’s not a matter of choice; it’s a matter of surviving these times.
For those students who have held on, the required social work internships have evolved dramatically. Social work students deliver services online, learn remotely, and show up to social services agencies in deep transition. Undoubtedly some innovation will come from this, but also some workers will leave and not return. Their education did not prepare them for the use of technology, for working from home, for the high risk of infection, for the chronic long term crisis work they face now.
How did COVID-19 create the perfect storm for social worker burnout? Social workers told me.
Actions that White Social Work Educators can do now for Racial Justice
Editor’s Note: This blog post was written in collaboration with my good colleague, Dr. Melanie Sage of the University of Buffalo’s School of Social Work . Many thanks to our colleagues who reviewed and made helpful suggestions for this post prior to publication.
This blog post is inspired by the list 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice by Corinne Shutack. We wrote this blog post as a way to begin our own work toward becoming anti-racist social work professors, to analyze our own practice, and to set our own goals. As we began identifying resources, we realized we should use our privilege to share with our communities through this blog and via Twitter (@laurelhitchcock & @melaniesage). We use the term BIPOC in this article to refer to Black,Indigenous, and People of Color.
We are not experts, which perhaps makes it even more important that we share and model this work. Please note that these are not the ten most important things, but they are things on our minds right now. (Please contact us if we’ve made a mistake.)
Book Group Discussion Guide for Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology
Back in September, Melanie Sage, Nancy Smyth, and I announced a virtual book group for our work – Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology. The goals of the book group were to: 1) create a supportive learning community; and 2) provide space for reflection about one’s own professional development with teaching with technology. You can read more about this blog post:
Teaching Social Work with Digital Technology Book Group
We launched our book group in January and ended it in June 2020, with monthly meetings and a moderated online private Facebook group. The group included a monthly live virtual meeting with discussion moderated by the authors and guest facilitators. Live meetings allowed members to participate and ask questions. In between these live meetings, the facilitators led and moderated discussions about teaching with tech, offering reflective questions and simple learning tasks. Additionally, all live meetings were recorded and archived for later viewing in the group. We will leave the group up as an archive until the end of 2020. Please know that this group will no longer be moderated.
Overall, we had a total of 223 members in the group, and based on the group analytics there were over two hundred posts submitted, and a lot more members reviewing/reading the posts. Although we expected greater engagement, we know that this year brought unexpected challenges for all of us. We believe that good discussion prompts and questions from our facilitators promoted thoughtful reflection and engagement each month. We are sharing these questions and prompts here in this blog post so that others can use them for their own review or to start book groups in their institutions. Here is the discussion guide:
Teaching & Learning in Social Work by Laurel Iverson Hitchcock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
