Preparing Students to Address the Grand Challenges for Social Work: Researching, Teaching, and Practicing Interdisciplinary Collaboration

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Social workers have been engaging in interprofessional practice and education for more than a century (Kennedy, 2020), and the Journal of Social Work and Education (JSWE) has been drawing continued attention to this issue since the 1970s (Berg-Weger & Schneider, 1998; Falk, 1977). The issue remains more relevant than ever within 21st-century social work scholarship and practice. As noted in the preamble to the National Association of Social Workers’s Code of Ethics (2021), “[T]he primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, living in poverty.” This ambitious mission was given a strategic roadmap through the drafting of the Grand Challenges for Social Work (Uehara et al., 2014). The challenges are, in fact, grand, and according to their guiding principles, the grand challenges are designed to address the most compelling social issues of the 21st century, and as such, one of the five original criteria for the grand challenges was that they “generate cross-sector or interdisciplinary collaboration” (Barth et al., 2022, p. 6). That involve diverse stakeholder groups, resources, and outcomes across multiple systems.

These Grand Challenges hold additional weight in the context of a postpandemic society, which has witnessed drastic, rapid, and lasting changes across the globe related to social interactions, health, and economics. In addition, human societies are experiencing massive technological shifts brought about by generative artificial intelligence (AI) and environmental and demographic shifts spurred on by the existential crisis of climate change. These disruptive events, some sudden, and some long-present, have exacerbated threats to individual and family well-being and social connections, destabilizing economic and political systems, and driving increasing economic inequality and health disparities. Being able to achieve our discipline’s Grand Challenges, and proactively tackle future socially disruptive events, both foreseen and not, necessitates that social work engage collaboratively across disciplines and leverage the convergent expertise that can arise when our discipline engages with diverse fields like engineering, public health, psychology, medical science, geography, education, and the arts. Therefore, it is an important time to revisit the topic of interdisciplinary collaboration in the context of social work education and the Grand Challenges (Miller et al., 2018).

With these thoughts in mind, we issued a special call within JSWE on interdisciplinarity to curate a collection of contemporary conceptual articles, case studies, and best practices in interdisciplinary practice and education within social work. The articles within this issue address a wide array of topics, including big data and technology, climate change, reproductive justice, antiracism, and integrated health, among others. Our intention through this special issue is to push the discipline of social work to make ever more innovative connections across traditional and emerging disciplinary and institutional boundaries to fast-track progress toward achieving the Grand Challenges and realizing our discipline’s historic mission to enhance human well-being for all.

Two articles within this special issue provide overarching frameworks for interdisciplinary collaboration within social work. Callahan and Higgins, building on prior work, call for an interdisciplinary specialization within social work—individuals specifically trained to work across disciplines. The idea has become particularly compelling in the 21st century as federal organizations like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation prioritize team science (Sokols et al., 2008). Moreover, Lee and Wolf-Branigin offer a theoretical perspective on interdisciplinary collaboration through complex adaptive systems (CAS). They argue that CAS provides a more useful framework than the traditional ecological approach for addressing the societally complex issues inherent within the Grand Challenges.

The concept of interprofessional education was popularized in the field of internal medicine (Institute of Medicine, 1972), and social work has perhaps the longest history of interdisciplinary collaboration in health settings (see Henderson Carrigan, 1978). The Grand Challenges have centered social work’s health focus on health around disparities through the challenges of “closing the health gap,” and recent policy and practice shifts in healthcare have made interdisciplinary engagement more critical, even as we see both setbacks in health, as well as opportunities to close the health gap. The historic Dobbs decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade has created increasing urgency around reproductive health and justice and health disparities, and in this special issue, Poehling and colleagues discuss how interdisciplinary solutions can reduce health gaps stemming from reproductive healthcare access. Moreover, Trainor and colleagues argue that transdisciplinary, community-embedded strategies are necessary to reduce the maternal health gaps and achieve health justice.

The disruption of traditional social work field education during COVID-19 introduced new challenges for students to access the experiential learning that is so important to interdisciplinary healthcare training, among other Grand Challenges. Acquavita and colleagues demonstrate how a virtual reality simulation offers a new tool for practicing interdisciplinary healthcare to advance Grand Challenges across the domain of “Individual and Family Well-Being.” The expanded utility of virtual reality through AI will make simulation ever more relevant and effective to train students in working on diverse teams and clients and patients across the lifespan. Furthermore, Jenney and colleagues offer an example of how such simulation technologies can help train students working toward the Grand Challenge to “build healthy relationships to end violence.” Simulation learning may be particularly beneficial in such high-stakes practice settings where real-world clients with traumas or other adverse events require experienced practitioners. By leveraging new technologies, social work education can enhance experiential learning in these contexts where direct experience is unethical or unfeasible.

As an alternative to simulation, Singh and colleagues offer an experiential learning model that they call experiential learning labs (ELL). Their school created ELLs in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but they have enduring relevance in the context of the Grand Challenges. Unlike more static field placements, they argue that ELLs can provide dynamic highly timely training to students on emerging topics that may intersect with the Grand Challenges, such as climate change, new technologies, and healthcare innovations.

Storer and colleagues directly address the Grand Challenge of “harnessing technology for social good,” making a compelling argument for why emerging social workers should be involved in the design end of new technologies, a change from the usual approach of inviting end users to the table after the design. Storer and colleagues offer strategies for how social work can and should collaborate with computer science and engineering through research and development to make digital innovations more equitable and broadly beneficial.

This special issue spotlights additional creative examples of how Grand Challenges are being tackled through interdisciplinary approaches in social work education. Rondon-Jackson and colleagues raise the highly timely issue of how to better prepare social work students for working on the front lines of homelessness services. Indeed, the Grand Challenge to “end homelessness” is one of the most visible social issues facing societies today, and its complexity requires interdisciplinary solutions across social work, public planning, behavioral health, and public health. By enabling students to train in interdisciplinary homelessness services settings through field education, social work students are prepared to enter the field with an interdisciplinary, collaborative set of skills.

Mutari and Figart call for integrating economics content into social work curriculum to achieve two of the Grand Challenges—“reduce extreme income inequality” and “creating social responses to a changing environment.” Their call for a social economics education is prescient and innovative during a time of explosive income inequality and deregulation of financial institutions and structures designed to protect those most vulnerable.

Similarly, Smith and colleagues call for social workers to enter new conversations, in their case recognizing that social workers must be vocal in the global debate about how to address climate change. By engaging in climate science, social work can bring the perspective of environmental justice to the forefront of climate policymaking and practice.

Gates and Alfrey bring us back to the racial disparities in our society that drive so many of the Grand Challenges, and which are encapsulated in the Grand Challenge to “end racism.” They argue that interdisciplinary perspectives are necessary to truly understand the intersectional and historical contexts for racial disparities and the effects on people’s lives today. Gates and Alfrey challenge social work to sustain a critical race perspective to fully achieve our Grand Challenges.

Finally, Saulnier and Walker demonstrate a strategy for the Grand Challenge to “achieve equal opportunity and justice” that is relevant within academia, and which may also promote the Grand Challenge to “ensure healthy development for youth.” They discuss how to engage social work field students in an interdisciplinary wraparound student success program for students who may face particularly high barriers to academic success. Social work educators can think through how their own universities are working across disciplines and units to achieve student success and identify opportunities to employ social work students in a variety of settings that intersect with many of the Grand Challenges.

In sum, the discipline of social work is embedded in a commitment to social justice—all persons deserve equal opportunity to thrive. Equal opportunity requires thinking creatively and critically and through a problem-solving lens. We must understand the complex systems in which people live and work and how these systems interact and how to access levers for change. We hope that this special issue emboldens social work educators to think audaciously and confidently about how to achieve the Grand Challenges. This special issue renews the call for social workers to connect with other professions and disciplines to harness the diverse opportunities and skills that multidisciplinary stakeholders offer, and bring these skills to bear on social work’s driving mission to achieve social justice for all people.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Norma A. Alcantar

Norma A. Alcantar is Professor at The University of South Florida.

Courtney Cronley

Courtney Cronley is Associate Professor at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Noelle Fields

Noelle Fields is Assistant Professor at The University of Texas at Arlington.

Sondra J. Fogel

Sondra J. Fogel is Associate Professor at The University of South Florida.

Stephen Mattingly

Stephen Mattingly is Professor at The University of Texas at Arlington.

Anne Nordberg

Anne Nordberg is Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Arlington.