This issue of JSWE offers a guest editorial from Editorial Advisory Board Member Danielle Parrish as well as a collection of conceptual, empirical, and teaching notes. Dr. Parrish’s editorial is on a topic which is concerning given social work education’s emphasis on evidence-informed practice—failure among social work educators to agree on whether evidence-informed practice refers to a decision-making process in which practitioners and service users collaborate or, rather, to specific interventions for which there is some evidentiary basis. This failure to agree on a common definition of terms has important implications for how practice is taught in social work education programs and for how well-prepared social workers might be to select interventions based on emerging research.
This issue also presents three conceptual articles, starting with Leduc (“‘Let us continue free as the air’: Truthfully reconciling social work education to indigenous lands”) who discusses the implications of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings for social work education in North America. Greenfield, Atteberry Ash, and Plassmeyer (“Teaching social work and social policy in the era of hyperpartisanship”) offer a timely discussion of the difficult classroom conversations about social policy in our polarized culture and explore how to ground these discussions in professional values, pedagogical theory, and educational best practices to help students build competency in social policy analysis. And Jensen and Strom-Gottfried (“An integrative framework for developing comprehensive examinations to measure student social work competencies”) present a framework, illustrations, and methodological considerations for design and development of comprehensive examinations to assess student acquisition of professional competencies.
There are eight empirical papers presented in this issue. McCarty-Caplan (“Seeing the same thing differently: Program director, faculty, and student perceptions of MSW LGBT competence”) presents an exploratory study on LGBT competence in MSW programs. Canada, Freese, and Stone (“Integrative Behavioral Health Clinic: A model for social work practice, community engagement, and in vivo learning”) evaluated patient outcomes of a free, integrated behavioral health clinic established to provide services in Missouri and staffed by students. Simmons, Taylor, Anderson, and Neely-Barnes (“Comparative experiences of first- and continuing-generation social work students”) report on a comparison of social work students who are first-generation and continuing students. Stauss, Koh, and Collie (“Comparing the effectiveness of an online human diversity course to face-to-face instruction”) used pre- and post-tests across two versions of a course to assess students’ awareness and ability to recognize cultural diversity and oppression and level of belief that society is just. Negrea and colleagues (“Research attitudes and their correlates among undergraduate social work students”) used an online survey to identify student characteristics associated with positive research attitudes among undergraduate social work students. Hitchcock and colleagues (“Learning about poverty through simulation: A pilot evaluation”) evaluated the effects of team-based poverty simulations on students’ critical thinking about and ability to understand others’ perspectives regarding living in poverty. Palma-García, Gómez Jacinto, and Hombrados-Mendieta (“Reciprocal relationship between resilience and professional skills: A longitudinal study with social work students”) used panel model analysis to examine the development of resilience and its relationship to acquisition of professional skills across a four-year period. And Moffatt and Oxhandler (“Religion and spirituality in master of social work education: Past, present, and future considerations”) collected data on accredited MSW programs to determine if they included a course on religion/spirituality and analyzed syllabi for content and readings.
Finally, we present seven teaching notes in this issue of JSWE. Washburn and Zhou (“Technology-enhanced clinical simulations: Tools for practicing clinical skills in online social work programs”) discuss evidence for the incorporation of simulated patients and Second Life for building direct practice skills in online courses. Roberts, Sellers, Franks, and Nelson (“Social work week: Harnessing the potential of group practice to achieve transformational learning”) compare the effectiveness of online and face-to-face instruction for human diversity courses. Zeitlin (“Innovations in teaching research: Learning by doing”) describes active learning research projects using single subject design to teach practice evaluation skills to social work students. Washington (“Lessons learned from developing and implementing a dementia caregiving graduate-level service-learning course”) delineates faculty experiences in the development and implementation of a course using a person-in-environment framework to teach social work practice with family systems affected by dementia. Larsson, Högberg, and Lundälv (“Popular science writing in a social work program: From an idea to a student anthology”) describe how students in an undergraduate course on long-term illnesses and disabilities collaborated with faculty to publish manuscripts developed for the course. Sayre (“Reification and recognition in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program”) describes a class on drugs and crime offered in a men’s prison in which roughly half of the students in the class were university students and the other half were prison inmates. Finally, Sears and colleagues (“Mapping the science of social work debate: An exercise in doctoral student education”) provide a brief overview of concept mapping as it was used in a doctoral-level seminar to identify, organize, and analyze arguments in the science of social work debate.