Growing concerns arise over the effectiveness of cultural competency and humility in addressing systemic racism in social work. Scholars advocate for the incorporation of critical race theory (CRT) into social work education; however, its polarization creates uncertainty. This systematized review synthesizes the contemporary use of CRT in social…

Training social workers to provide competent professional practice is of utmost importance. However, there have been ongoing dilemmas in enhancing practice competence in clinical social work, such as the challenges of selecting treatment approaches among numerous empirically supported approaches. Increasingly, common factors and common elements…

Despite high rates of compassion stress within the field of social work and the growing acknowledgment that self-care is critically important to ethical social work practice and to the practitioner's overall well-being, social work education has not yet adequately responded to the self-care and wellness needs of students and new professionals, nor…

While there is mounting research on the well-known white founders of social work, documentation of Black social work pioneers and their contributions is scarce -- in both social work education and the broader telling of the profession's history. Given the systemic exclusion of Black social workers in the dominant narrative of social work history,…

Considering the significant contributions of Black women social workers to our profession, and the unyielding stressors and expectations disproportionately affecting Black women in the context of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19, addressing anti-Blackness and understanding the lived experiences of Black women within higher education are essential…

The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization overturned reproductive, health, and abortion rights for women. Using the NASW Code of Ethics, a course assignment is offered for students to examine the professional, ethical commitment and responsibility of social workers to advocate for these rights and…

This paper aims to understand the impact on student learning of redesigning an elective substance use course with the intent of contextualizing the topic by modeling a structural critical lens. In addition, we look at how this shift impacts students' approaches to working with clients who use substances. Secondary data from student course…

Social work education is at a crossroads with the release of the 2022 Educational Policy Administration Standards (EPAS, 2022), which emphasize anti-racist practice. To teach anti-racist social work one must be prepared to use anti-racist pedagogical practices and be supported to do so institutionally. Freire (2020) proposes that education be a…

Across the United States, racist, hate-filled rhetoric, attitudes, and behaviors are daily occurrences. Events like officer-involved shootings of unarmed Black men, women, and non-binary individuals, along with the increase in white supremacist and nationalist groups, have cumulatively created a climate of fear and mistrust. This fear and mistrust…

Social work education has responded to the heightened demand for graduates as competent behavioral health practitioners. However, the preparation of social work graduate students for transitioning into leadership roles in behavioral health settings is limited. To enhance graduate students' macrolevel competencies, specifically in behavioral…

Social work research has adopted the scientific method rooted in the hard sciences as the gold standard for understanding human behavior and creating interventions and policies for both individual and systemic change. Current methodologies are rooted in White supremacy that lack the subjectivity needed to provide space for the effects of racism…

Background: Good communication is central to effective social work practice, helping to develop constructive working relationships and improve the outcomes of people in receipt of social work services. There is strong consensus that the teaching and learning of communication skills for social work students is an essential component of social work…

Case-based learning has a long history in social work education, but has been relatively unaffected by the advances of information and computer technology. The aim of this study is to discuss new, and perhaps more rewarding, forms of decision case learning by using a computer-based simulation, SimChild, that puts the student in the position of a…

Across North America, the open education movement has blossomed in the past 10 years, with a majority of institutions of higher education employing open textbooks in at least one course. Unfortunately, social work lags behind other disciplines in the adoption, adaptation, and creation of open educational resources. This teaching note offers…

Disruptions caused by the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) during the spring 2020 semester has magnified the need to understand student experiences during pandemics, especially as research on social work students' experiences during pandemics is limited. Forty-two undergraduate social work students at a large public state university in Pennsylvania…