From the Editor—The Kids Are All Right: Lessons From Marjory Stoneman Douglas High

Valentine’s Day, 2018. A lone 19-year-old gunman, armed with a legally obtained AR-15, a military-style weapon that discharges dozens of rounds at a time, entered a Florida high school, killed 17 people, and wounded 17 others. In the aftermath of another in a long list of mass school shootings, America braced itself for one more round of vigils, “thoughts and prayers,” admonishments that it was “too early to talk about guns,” and public breast-beatings and recriminations about America’s “gun culture.”

But this time was different. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida wanted action, and they knew how to effect it. Having lost their friends and feared for their own lives, the issues of military-style weapons and high-capacity magazines were personal for these students, and they refused to be shamed into quiet, cowed into submission from conservatives and guns rights activists, co-opted by others’ political agendas, or helplessness. The students gathered in living rooms, in front of cameras, and declared #NeverAgain. In the space of less than a month, these teens successfully demanded a change in gun laws in the state of Florida, convincing their own Governor, Rick Scott, to buck the National Rifle Association. They organized a national 17-minute school walk-out, planned a march on Washington, DC and cities throughout the United States, raised millions of dollars for their cause, and made America take them very seriously. It remains to be seen, of course, whether they will be able to convince the federal government that arming school staff is not a satisfactory solution.

They made me alternately cry and cheer in admiration. I thought wistfully of my own youth, when we organized against the Viet Nam war and on behalf of ecology. We were successful, in some ways, but not as successful as immediately as these youth. What was the difference? How were these teens, notorious as “digital natives” with short attention spans, able to command the attention of a news-weary American public? How were they able to ignite the passions of students all over the country? How were they able to stand up to conspiracy theories claiming they were funded by George Soros or CNN? How were they able to persist where others had given up?

When I heard that students were organizing a local march in support of the March 24th #NeverAgain March on Washington, I offered to help. After meeting with a handful of students, I quickly realized that if they need my help, they will ask for it. They are the “mass shooting generation.” They are the generation who grew up learning how to get what they want, when they want it, from the Internet. Within days of February 14th, these students had tweeted to state legislators, U.S. Senators, and members of Congress to clearly express their demands. While they appreciate early detection and intervention for people with mental health issues, they want to do something about military style weapons and high-capacity magazines. While they appreciate adults wanting to help, they want them to rent hotel rooms in their behalf, not to tell them how to organize themselves or what to say.

Asked why she thought she had become the face of the #NeverAgain movement, 18-year old Emma González suggested, only somewhat facetiously, that “it just might have been my hair.” This young woman, with a buzz-cut and arm full of woven bracelets, has already been seen by millions of viewers on CNN, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook giving two riveting speeches that commanded the attention of students and adults alike, as well as aroused negative attention from the NRA and Second Amendment proponents. She has also been the recipient of much media attention, including interviews by CNN, 60 Minutes, and BuzzFeed and has written an op-ed for Harper’s Bazaar (González, 2018). She has 1.25 million Twitter followers and she is eligible to vote in the next election. And she is but one of several Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students who have seized the consciousness of Americans too distracted by the latest outrageous news media coverage to ordinarily pay attention for long enough to do anything productive.

While I originally thought that, as a social worker, I might be able to help teach high school students how to organize, I am humbled to realize that it is the other way around. We have much to learn from Emma González, her colleagues at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and at middle and high schools around the country. My hope is that maybe, just maybe, we can attract one or two of these student leaders into the social work profession so we can learn more about how to be more successful in our own efforts to organize for change.

In this issue

This issue of JSWE offers a collection of conceptual, empirical, and a number of teaching notes. Our first three articles are conceptual. Moxley (“Documenting environmental degradation and its consequences using visual methods as pedagogical tools in social work education”) argues that the destruction of the environment and poisoning of air and water resources differentially affect disenfranchised populations and that social work educators can use visual methods to sensitize students to environmental injustice. Steen (“Reconceptualizing social work behaviors from a human rights perspective”) addresses the operationalization of social work human rights practice competencies for evaluating coursework across the curriculum and provides a model for development of these competencies throughout social work education. Finally, Mattison (“Informed consent agreements: Standards of care for digital social work practices”) identifies unique ethical and legal challenges raised by remote digital social work practice and suggests comprehensive informed consent policy to prevent threats to privacy and confidentiality in e-practice.

There are four quantitative articles presented in this issue. Voith, Holmes, and Duda-Banwar (“Clicking toward better grades: The use of student response systems in social work education”) found that, controlling for important covariates, use of clickers contributed to increased test scores. Teater and Mendoza (“Workload of social work academics and factors that contribute to time spent on research”) used a cross-sectional survey of social work academics to examine relationships between perceptions of universities’ workload expectations and actual time spent on teaching, service, and research. Grady, Swick, and Powers (“The Implicit Curriculum Survey: An examination of the psychometric properties”) report on an exploratory factor analysis of an instrument to evaluate implicit curriculum across field, academics, community, diversity, faculty advising, and support services in four geographically dispersed MSW programs. And Bowie, Nashwan, Thomas, Davis-Buckley, and Johnson (“An assessment of social work education efforts to recruit and retain MSW students of color”) examined 74 social work programs in the United States to describe efforts for recruiting and retaining MSW students of color.

This issue of JSWE also features three mixed-methods studies. Sampson, Parrish, and Washburn (“Assessing MSW students’ integrated behavioral health skills using an Objective Structured Clinical Examination”) report on use of an OSCE to evaluate specific practice competencies among students in a behavioral health training program. Benner and Curl (“Exhausted, stressed, and disengaged: Does employment create burnout for social work students?”) used a web-based survey of social work students to assess the impact of employment on academic success and physical and mental health. And Schreiber and Minarik (“Simulated clients in a group practice course: Engaging facilitation and embodying diversity”) used the Diversity and Oppression Scale and focus groups to evaluate the impact of a social work group practice class that utilized simulated clients.

Wrapping up the empirical articles in this issue of JSWE, we feature three qualitative studies and one descriptive article. Cai, Bo, and Hsaio (“Emerging social work field education trends in China”) interviewed 54 MSW students regarding their field experiences at a university in Shanghai and found a number of challenges. They argue that competency-based field education may be a potential solution for these problems. Hamilton-Mason and Schneider (“Antiracism expanding social work education: A qualitative analysis of the Undoing Racism workshop experience”) used grounded theory methods to analyze student participants’ thoughts and reactions from a workshop and conclude that their 2.5-day workshop may be more effective than traditional course content to teach antiracism material and develop concrete strategies to combat racism. Olcoń, Pantell, and Sund (“Recruitment and retention of Latinos in social work education: Building on students’ community cultural wealth”) present a case study to examine how one BSW program builds on students’ community strengths to ensure the continued recruitment and retention of Latino students. Finally, Roulston, Cleak, and Vreugdenhil (“Promoting readiness to practice: Which learning activities promote competence and professional identity for student social workers during practice learning?”) sampled undergraduate social work students in Northern Ireland about usefulness of learning activities they received in their field placements for developing practice competence and professional social work identity.

Finally, we present four teaching notes in this issue of JSWE. Aguiniga and Bowers (“Partnering macro social work students and agencies addressing youth homelessness: A model for service learning”) describe a three-pronged approach to service learning that engaged the community, spread the message about youth and transgender youth homelessness, and consisted of projects that people can easily implement in their own communities. Nicotera (“Circle of Insight: A paradigm and pedagogy for Liberation Social Justice social work education”) presents a dialectical, open, purposeful process to teach competencies in advancing human rights and social, economic, and environmental justice. Bice-Wigington and Morgan (“Diversity and difference through a rural lens”) used Iwelunmor and colleagues’ PEN-3 cultural model to facilitate an intersectional understanding of diversity and difference, including that of place diversity to encompass rural issues. Finally, Asakura, Bogo, Good, and Power (“Social Work Serial: Using video-recorded simulated client sessions to teach social work practice”) introduce Social Work Serial, a pedagogical project involving video-based simulation, and discuss its pedagogical rationale and implementation.