This teaching note reflects on the challenges we face when attempting to cultivate the seeds of social justice in our pedagogy and our engagement toward social justice. First, we situate our vision of pedagogy in a critical lens and present challenges we encounter when trying to foster activism among students. The challenges we identify allow us…

This study examined the relationships between racial knowledge and emotions as predictors of anti-racist behaviors. We analyzed responses of 135 White MSW students from a cross-sectional survey conducted in May 2018. Regression was used to analyze the relationships between colorblind attitudes, empathy, guilt, shame, and anti-racist behaviors.…

With many social workers already using or working in sport, understanding available learning opportunities is critical to enhance competency-based practice, a cornerstone of the profession. To meet this need, this study explored learning opportunities used by social workers using or working in sport. In total, 15 social work professionals were…

To foster development of cultural humility in social work students, educators must listen carefully to students to uncover and disrupt implicit biases about other groups. This study was a narrative analysis of undergraduate social work student papers about identity and intersectionality where most students wrote about religion/spirituality and how…

The COVID-19 virus produced unprecedented challenges in the delivery of social work education nationwide. This study focused on the innovative approaches and transition efforts of one college of social work in the United States. The evaluation data of these efforts for six face-to-face and online Master of Social Work (MSW) courses and visual data…

A dominant conceptualization of empathy in social work practice and education, provided by Karen Gerdes and Elizabeth Segal, relies heavily on the simulation theory adopted directly from the cognitive neurosciences. The aim was to critically challenge such a view by reporting on some recent empirical findings from the field in which professional…

In light of community changes and curricular deficits, it is essential for social work educators to find ways to teach social empathy and poverty content to students who may or may not have had much direct contact with economically diverse households in their formative years. Our framework and research pick up where well-intended policy efforts…

Experiential learning theory suggests that students increase their understanding when given the opportunity to experience a particular situation in addition to learning about it intellectually. This theory was used to construct an assignment to assist social work master's students in better understanding food insecurity and the Supplemental…

In the 21st-century sociotechnical context where humans are steeped in information, approaches to social work education that foster students' capacities to critically consume and be well poised to reflexively apply information are critical. This article presents findings from a qualitative study designed to deepen understanding of social work…

Providing effective services to clients with increasingly severe challenges in an era of fiscal constraints calls for schools of social work to assume greater responsibility for preparing interns for clinical practice. This article describes a virtual field practicum (VFP), an online skill-building experience designed to meet this need and reports…

Social work education stresses training students to understand oppressive structural barriers and promote social and economic justice. Social empathy, which is rooted in a deep understanding of those who are different from us through contextual understanding and macro perspective-taking, offers a framework for teaching social justice that…

Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed has been the basis for radical performance techniques practiced around the world. Widely a staple for theatre performance syllabi, it also has an innovative application for the social work classroom. This article designates Boal's four stages of his poetics of the oppressed and concomitant theatrical…

Empathy is a familiar term in social work education, although how to teach and learn empathy is not well documented. Equally, how non-indigenous Australian practitioners learn empathic regard for indigenous peoples living with the crippling legacies of colonialism is not commonly described in the literature. The primary aim of the classroom-based…

The Diversity and Oppression Scale (DOS) is a standardized instrument measuring self-reported student learning about diversity and oppression based on requirements of the Council on Social Work Education. DOS was tested with social work students in 2 major North American universities. Factor structure was examined using exploratory factor analysis…

Social work student participation in global experiences continues to increase despite limited research on the impacts of these educational experiences on knowledge and skill development. This article reports on professional identity and skill development for 25 U.S. Latinx students who completed internships or service-learning projects in Costa…