Teaching Note—Teaching Socially Just Culturally Competent Practice Online: Pedagogical Challenges and Lessons Learned During the Pandemic

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ABSTRACT

Centering social justice into social work practice is vital to the profession, but both what and how to accomplish this task are pedagogical challenges in social work education. This teaching note introduces an elective course open to both Master of Social Work and doctoral students to develop holistic competence for socially just and culturally competent social work practice. We describe how the course originally designed in an in-person format was redesigned and adapted to an online format during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another consideration during this transition is how this requires social work students who are adult learners to balance family, work, and school demands while attending virtual classrooms in a personal space during physical distancing. We explain metacompetence and procedural competence, which are two competence dimensions conceptualized in the holistic competence model. Each competence dimension was targeted through a variety of synchronous and asynchronous virtual teaching approaches (e.g., intergroup dialog, digital storytelling, and virtual simulation). While these teaching approaches may be applicable to other online courses, we highlight specific considerations for teaching social justice online. We close with a discussion of challenges and new lessons from teaching social justice in social work practice courses online and provide recommendations for future teaching and research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eunjung Lee

Eunjung Lee, PhD, MSW, RSW, Toula Kourgiantakis, PhD, MSW, RSW, and Ran Hu, MSW, RSW, are with the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto.