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The last year and a half has frequently been described as unprecedented as the COVID-19 pandemic led to sudden, unexpected changes in daily life around the world to prevent its spread. This crisis required social work administrators, faculty members, staff members, students, and field instructors to abruptly transition educational, research, and administrative duties into an online setting. Specifically, social work administrators had to make decisions about how faculty members, staff members, and students could proceed with social work educational activities, including admissions and field placement. Social work deans, directors, and chairs, as well as university administrative teams, had to determine how to hold faculty meetings and provide student support services within public health guidelines. Many social work educators had to transition from fully face-to-face courses to online courses for the first time in their careers. Social work field directors, staff members, and field instructors had to also quickly identify ways to finish field hours while considering the need for social distancing. Meanwhile, students, educators, and staff members, particularly Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, have had to contend with the toll of dealing with twin pandemics—COVID-19 and racism—and the associated exhaustion, anxiety, trauma, and loss.
Considering these changes and other challenges (e.g., educators and students working from home with young or school-aged children, the mass loss of jobs, the disproportionate impact on communities and groups that have been historically marginalized), important decisions have been made about how to work toward educational objectives in these unprecedented circumstances. This special issue presents research and lessons learned from navigating the pandemic during the COVID-19 pandemic with implications for future educational disruptions due to pandemic or natural disasters, as well strategies and models that can continue to serve us well past the conclusion of the pandemic. We appreciate the hard work of all of the authors who submitted high-quality manuscripts for consideration in this special issue. We had an unusually large number of submissions and, unfortunately, were limited by the length of the special issue and a desire to cover content across various areas of social work education. Fortunately, we were able to accept a few additional manuscripts for a special section that will be coming out in a future issue. We would like to extend our deep gratitude to the reviewers for this special issue, who provided such thoughtful, high-quality reviews during such a demanding and difficult time. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the additional valuable work of Mia Moreno-Hines, JSWE’s production editor, who successfully secured reviewers for our unexpectedly large number of submissions during the pandemic when obtaining reviewers has been a more difficult task than usual. We hope that you enjoy and find this special issue relevant to your current and future work.
The special issue begins with articles that investigate the effects of COVID-19 on teaching and education in social work. The COVID-19 pandemic propelled faculty not only to quickly adapt teaching pedagogy to an online format but also to include content that was responsive to the widespread use of telehealth and remote social services. In “Paving the Path for Tele–Mental Health Services: Transitions in a Student-Led Behavioral Health Clinic During COVID-19,” Canada, Easter, and Banks provide the case of a student-led behavioral health clinic that transitioned to providing services through telehealth. They present student and faculty experiences for this transition of service delivery and the implications on client engagement and quality of life that can be instructive in thinking through strategies for remote social services. Because the shift toward the increased use of information and communications technology has not been fully explored, the teaching note “Preparing Social Workers for the Digital Future of Social Work Practice” by Mishna, Sanders, Sewell, and Milne offers a theoretical framework, discusses ethical considerations, and considers the implications for supervision. In the classroom and field, social work educators have noted the many challenges that social work students have had navigating these times of public health and social crisis. In “We Move On and Get It Done: Educating Social Workers Through a Pandemic,” Gherardi, Mallonee, and Gergerich use a strengths-based approach to highlight the resilience of social work students and discuss how these assets can be used to propel educators into actions for social work education. Mitschke, Praetorius, Magruder, Hong, Tran, and Mammah report on a qualitative study of a peer mentoring program for graduate students during the pandemic at a Hispanic-Serving Institution in “A Hand in the Fog: Graduate Students as Virtual Peer Mentors in the COVID-19 Crisis.” This study provides important implications for offering peer student support during academic disruption. Next, Lee, Kourgiantakis, and Hu provide guidance and lessons learned when transitioning a cross-cultural social work practice course for online delivery and centering social justice during the pandemic in their teaching note, “Teaching Socially Just Culturally Competent Practice Online: Pedagogical Challenges and Lessons Learned During the Pandemic.” In “Assessing a Trauma-Informed Approach to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Higher Education: A Mixed Methods Study,” Barros-Lane, Smith, McCarty, Perez, and Sirrianni further highlight the promising role of a Trauma Informed Care (TIC) approach using a convergent, parallel, mixed-methods design, to evaluate the TIC approach at a Bachelor’s of Social Work program at the start of the pandemic. Hitchcock, Báez, Sage, Marquart, Lewis, and Smyth also root their orientation to trauma-informed approaches and describe theoretical frameworks that can inform educational practices and decision-making in times of disruption in “Social Work Educators’ Opportunities During COVID-19: A Roadmap for Trauma-Informed Teaching During Crisis.” Further, they delineate best practices related to trauma-informed teaching, including technology-mediated strategies for best practices in crisis course design and delivery.
Underscoring the role of the “twin pandemics” of COVID-19 and racial injustice and the disproportionate toll on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, in a teaching note, “Teaching Trauma Content Online During COVID-19: A Trauma-Informed and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy,” Sherwood, VanDeusen, Weller, and Gladden discuss police brutality and racial injustice and unpack how social work education can adapt our teaching in a trauma-informed and culturally responsive manner. In the teaching note “Virtual Practice Fridays: Responding to Disruptions Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic in Field and the Classroom,” Kourgiantakis, Hu, Ramsundarsingh, Lung, and West report on students’ perceptions of simulation learning offered virtually during social distancing pandemic restrictions. Their findings provide a way to teach social work practice competencies when practice opportunities are limited or further supplement existing efforts to teach these competencies.
Public health guidelines dictated whether social work students could continue in their field placements, and this was an ever-changing landscape. In “COVID-19 and Social Work Field Education: A Descriptive Study of Students’ Experiences,” Davis and Mirick discuss field issues for bachelor’s of social work and master’s of social work (MSW) students in a nationwide survey conducted shortly after the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization in March and April 2020. The experiences of students in field placement were broad and unique. Szczygiel and Emery-Fertitta report on how forced termination, parallel process, and shared trauma were experienced by students during this time in “Field Placement Termination During COVID 19: Lessons on Forced Termination, Parallel Process, and Shared Trauma.” Such challenges underscore the importance of effective social work leadership. In “Teaching Social Work Leadership and Supervision: Lessons Learned From On-Campus and Online Formats,” Vito and Schmidt Hanbidge provide strategies for delivering leadership and supervision training in online formats and discuss how this modality can be effectively used to further build leadership and supervision training during future educational disruptions or when trying to increase accessibility to such trainings moving forward. Finally, the administrative team of field educators who led our programs through the pandemic have learned valuable lessons. In the field note “Social Work Field Education in Quarantine: Administrative Lessons From the Field During a Worldwide Pandemic,” Melero, Hernandez, and Bagdasaryan utilize field notes from administrators in the field education department of a Hispanic-Serving Institution to provide recommendations to support student mental health and policy development of online delivery of social services.
Social work students have been the unsung heroes during this time, balancing a constant changing environment, stress from the pandemics, and home and life responsibilities that were consistently in flux. In “‘Nobody’s Failing at Going Through a Global Pandemic’: Lessons and Tensions in Social Work Education,” Paceley, Cole, Robinson, Carr, Jen, Riquino, Mitra, and Wright use in-depth interviews to uncover students’ experiences with loss of safety and balance of flexibility. Scheffert, Parrish, and Harris uncover issues around student stress, access to supports, and academic stress within the context of the pandemics in a cross-sectional survey of social work students in “Factors Associated With Social Work Students’ Academic Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A National Survey.” Further, Perone discusses the multiple interpersonal roles of MSW students and fading boundaries between family and school environments and concerns over health, family, and larger community concerns during the pandemic in “Surviving the Semester During COVID-19: Evolving Concerns, Innovations, and Recommendations.”
Addressing the rapid changes in departments and schools of social work during COVID-19 among faculty and faculty workload, Washburn, Crutchfield, Roper, Smith, and Padilla dedicate their article, “Changes to MSW Faculty Workload Resulting From COVID-19: An Issue of Equity,” to discussing these shifts in responsibility and potential implications for faculty equity by surveying social work faculty from 18 accredited MSW programs in Texas. Non-tenure track faculty were often subject to increases in teaching and field responsibilities as well as job precarity, underscoring the importance of redesigning our programs to meet our social justice mission when it comes to the treatment of staff and faculty. In “Redesigning Schools of Social Work Into Schools of Social Work and Social Justice: Opportunities for Civic and Organizational Renewal in a Justice Reform Environment,” McBeath and Austin identify how schools can respond by strengthening democratic learning spaces and reforming our curriculum with an emphasis on culturally responsive leadership. Furthering this work in “COVID-19 and Structural Racial Inequity: Lessons Learned for Social Work Education,” Fariña, Kim, Watson, and Dyson discuss critical race theory and experiences of students of color at three institutions across the country, highlighting socially unjust structural factors and ways in which faculty can respond to structural racism in social work programs.