From the Editor—Embarking on a New Challenge

With this issue of the Journal of Social Work Education (JSWE), I am deeply honored to be assuming the role of Editor-in-Chief for the next three years. I am embracing this challenge because I am passionate about scholarly communication and dedicated to the mission of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE, 2016) to advance “the quality of social work education for a professional practice that promotes individual, family, and community well-being, and social and economic justice.”

During my tenure as editor in chief, I hope to build on the substantial accomplishments of previous JSWE editors in developing editorial standards and in increasing the journal’s relevance for social work education at the baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral levels. As those who have preceded me, I want JSWE to be the premier publication social work educators think of to access the work of others and to disseminate their own scholarly work about social work education. To this end, I pledge to work with members of JSWE’s Editorial Advisory Board, its reviewers, CSWE’s publications staff, and our liaisons at Taylor & Francis to evaluate our current publication guidelines, peer-review processes, and production work flow. I hope to streamline, as much as possible, the process of manuscript submission and review so that the highest quality of social work educational scholarship is published as quickly as possible.

Other objectives for my tenure as editor in chief center around two main issues. First, I hope to continue to advocate for continued development of the evidence base for social work education (Yaffe, 2013). The CSWE (2015) Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards demand that program administrators evaluate program effectiveness with respect to “competencies and component behaviors that are comprised of knowledge, values, skills, and cognitive and affective processes in practice” (p. 6). Social work education will benefit from additional conceptualization of required competencies, increased research toward development of improved pedagogical strategies for these competencies, and rigorous, transparent evaluation of the outcomes of these strategies in terms of knowledge, skills, and cognitive and affective processes. I would like to encourage social work educators to continue their efforts to conceptualize, design, develop, and evaluate competency-based curricula and to submit their work to JSWE for dissemination.

Second, I hope to encourage social work educators to develop and evaluate strategies for integration of scholarship emerging from the Grand Challenges for Social Work (American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare, 2016) into social work curricula. In this issue of JSWE, we are delighted to present a special section of five articles directly addressing one of the Grand Challenges: Build financial capability for all. I encourage social work scholars to submit additional manuscripts and to propose additional special sections or special issues featuring Grand Challenges scholarship.

This issue’s special section, edited by Julie Birkenmaier, Christine Callahan, Jodi Jacobson Frey, and Margaret Sherraden, centers on financial capability and asset building. The articles in this section emerged from an event organized by the Financial Capability and Asset Building (FCAB) initiative at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis and the Financial Social Work Initiative at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, which aimed to advance FCAB in social work education, practice, and research as well as to strengthen networks of FCAB scholars, educators, professionals, and funders.

In addition to the special section, this issue also features four full-length articles and two Teaching Notes. Lorri S. McMeel, Sonya J. Leathers, and Tonya C. Strand describe the development and validation of a scale to assess students’ and clinicians’ self-efficacy in their abilities to use evidence-based interventions with children. Lenore E. Matthew and Benjamin J. Lough review the social work literature on international field placements to identify personal and institutional challenges facing students in such placements and recommend actions to manage these challenges. Carolyn Goossen and Michael J. Austin discuss the required involvement of service users in social work education in the United Kingdom, describe perceptions of this involvement, and suggest implications for social work education in the United States. Joseph D. Minarik discusses the construct of privilege as it is used in social work education and offers strategies for making this concept more accessible for social work students by connecting privileging to inequality and unequal distribution of opportunities. Finally, in their teaching note, Cynthia Tandy, Robert Vernon, and Darlene Lynch discuss the use of the Second Life virtual world to create a standardized client prototype for teaching interview skills to beginning social work students, and Sachi Ando in another teaching note, describes the use of a diversity event to inspire MSW students to appreciate the unique and rich experiences social workers and clients bring to the practice of social work.

In closing, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Susan P. Robbins, outgoing Editor-in-Chief of JSWE, for her diligent efforts on behalf of the journal and particularly for her efforts to increase the caliber, depth, and breadth of submissions to JSWE. In her four years of service as Editor-in-Chief, she oversaw a decrease in the lag to publication and an increase in the variety and quality of published articles. She also brought new awareness of and attention to JSWE through her excellent editorials and her mastery of social media channels. She aided in the transition from in-house production of the journal to our outside publisher, Taylor & Francis. Susan’s vision for JSWE has strengthened the journal’s overall commitment to the research side of social work education. She assembled an excellent Editorial Advisory Board consisting of Soleman Abu-Bader, David Pollio, Elizabeth Pomeroy, Viola Vaughan-Eden, and a rich cadre of capable and responsive reviewers to provide feedback to contributing authors. Further, she offered me the opportunity to serve as her associate editor over the past year and to learn many aspects of the editorial role from her, an opportunity that will serve JSWE well as I make the transition to the editorial role and navigate the learning curve. I have some high heels to fill, but with our excellent peer reviewers and with the assistance of the Editorial Advisory Board, CSWE Publications Manager Elizabeth Simon, and CSWE Production Editor Mia Moreno-Hines, I am confident that JSWE will continue its tradition of excellence in scholarly publication related to social work education.