Teaching Note: Infusing Diversity Content Into the BSW Curriculum: An LGBT Elders Example

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Ginger Meyette

Diversity is a topic that is increasingly important in BSW curriculum content. Social work students are going into practice in a multicultural milieu, and there is not enough room in the core curriculum for BSW educators to add unlimited elective courses to cover every diverse population group. As one case example, Baby Boomers of all races and backgrounds are aging, contributing to an unprecedented growth in the aging population. Included in this group are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) elders. Diversity issues, including LGBT elder issues, cross all practice areas; therefore, infusion of content embedded in courses can at least introduce students to the needs of these diverse populations and assist them in envisioning possible solutions to address these needs. This article presents a rationale for the infusion of diversity content into the BSW curriculum focusing on the example of LGBT elders. Suggestions for pedagogical infusion strategies are included.

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
David Beimers ◽  
Tristann Carter ◽  
Christine Black Hughes

Social work has a long history of working with clients with substance abuse issues, yet minimal attention has been given to academic preparation at the BSW level to work with this population. This study examines the competence of undergraduate social work students to successfully identify and respond to substance abuse issues in future clients. Perceived competence was examined in 50 senior BSW completed students at a midsize state university. Findings suggest that the undergraduate social work academic core curriculum does not adequately prepare future social workers to work with clients with substance abuse disorders. This study brings awareness to the academic arena for the need to have substance abuse content infused into the core social work curriculum to adequately prepare undergraduate social work students to feel confident and able to successfully identify, assess, and treat substance abuse issues in practice.


2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-63
Author(s):  
Jayshree Jani ◽  
Joshua Okundaye

For more than 25 years social work educators and practitioners have attempted to develop tools that would assist them in their efforts to work more effectively with people from different backgrounds. This issue is particularly important for students entering the profession. However, there has been little discussion in the literature about the developmental process of students and beginning practitioners and the effect of such tools on their attainment of practice competencies. This article discusses how the use of a culturagram influenced baccalaureate social work students’ ability to understand, assess, and plan an intervention with an immigrant family in a case scenario. We found that the culturagram augmented students’ learning and demonstrated the potential to move students and practitioners beyond cultural awareness to an ability to engage with difference.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-230
Author(s):  
Brittany Hunt ◽  
Sonyia Richardson

Though there are more than 5 million American Indian people living in the United States, and they are disproportionately represented among social workers’ clientele, social work curriculum rarely centers Indigenous history and knowledge. Therefore, the cultural competence training that social work students receive is incomprehensive because it often erases a critical portion of the population. This work focuses on the unique knowledge that one Indigenous social work instructor brings to her classroom, as well as the perspective of the BSW director who recruited her to the position. It is critical that the social work profession begin to move toward being representative of the diverse populations that we serve, not only in the field but also in the classroom. This work will provide examples of cultural competence training as well as Indigenous knowledge that can be incorporated into classrooms to indigenize those spaces and decolonize curricula. This article was written jointly by an Indigenous social work professor and an administrator and professor in a BSW program.


2001 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane S. Falk ◽  
Phyllis G. Ross

This article presents an approach to teaching social work writing within the core social work curriculum. Writing is recognized as being critical to effective professional practice and as an essential social work skill. Writing is also presented as a strategy for teaching social work knowledge, values, and skills. The authors share what they have learned and developed on the basis of their own teaching experiences with baccalaureate social work students. They identify nine purposes of social work writing, linking assignments with each purpose and discussing how the assignments can be used to teach social work writing skills concurrently with other core social work skills.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-178
Author(s):  
Claire L. Dente

The Council on Social Work Education's (CSWE) 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) included the goal of competency in the ability to “engage diversity and difference in practice.” This goal continued efforts to raise awareness of diversity issues for clients articulated in earlier EPAS. Social work education has included cultural competence in areas of difference including sexual orientation and religion and spirituality. Undergraduate social work students should understand the complexity of this intersection to provide culturally competent services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer clients, and to understand religious backgrounds that may not include affirmative messages on sexual orientation. This article presents an overview of the intersection of religion/spirituality and sexual orientation, and recommends audiovisual materials that can highlight salient issues for BSW students in pedagogy on this intersection.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
Denise Levy ◽  
Alisha Edmiston

Service learning has long been used to foster students' personal and professional development and encourage civic engagement. This study explored how service learning affected the development of professional values in undergraduate social work students, with a focus on the core values of the profession outlined by the National Association of Social Workers. Thirty- six students enrolled in a service- learning course with 30 hours of required service in an agency completed a survey at the end of the semester. The majority of respondents reported observing a slight or significant increase for them personally in each of the core values as a result of the service-learning experience. The core values of service and competence increased the most. Working with agency clients and participating in class discussions were the most helpful in the development of all the core values.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Björn Blom ◽  
Lennart Nygren

This article describes and discusses a number of fundamental aspects of analysing short written narratives. Of particular interest are the code-totality problems that arise during the transformation of several individual stories into a collective narrative. This article starts with a brief introduction to our previous narrative research on Swedish social-work students, which is followed by a description of textual interpretation according to Paul Ricœur's theory of interpretation, and a discussion and elaboration on the different concepts of meaning within his theory. The core of this article is an account of four models for analysing narrative data from several informants. This is followed by a concrete example of the implications that follow from the implementation of these models. We conclude that the degree of heterogeneity in the narrative material affects the choice of the mode of textual analysis and the code compilation.  


Author(s):  
Ashley M. Frazier

Abstract School speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are increasingly likely to serve children of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) parents or GLBT students as cultural and societal changes create growth in the population and increased willingness to disclose sexual orientation. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) has a progressive nondiscrimination statement that includes sexual orientation as a protected status and strongly urges the membership to develop cultural competence as a matter of ethical service delivery. The purpose of this article is to describe cultural competence in relation to GLBT culture, discuss GLBT parent and student cultural issues as they are important in parent-school or student-school relations, and to provide suggestions for increasing sensitivity in these types of interactions. A list of resources is provided.


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