This paper explores the experiences of social work practitioners making a career move from front-line practice into academia. Six participants engaged in a focus group and subsequent individual semi-structured interviews to reflect on their transitional experiences. From this, factors that helped or hindered the transition were identified and…

Most of the studies exploring social work education's impact on working with older adults (OA) examine intentions among students. This study goes beyond expressed intention and focuses upon the actual post-graduation career choices of 20 cohorts (1996-2016) of BSW graduates of an OA concentration at an Israeli school of social work. The 203 study…

The COVID-19 pandemic's impact on people's professional and personal lives is ongoing. The transition to remote teaching has particularly affected social work education due to its experiential methods incorporating a direct experience whereby students "learn by doing." This study examined the impact of the global pandemic and the…

Despite the importance of field education in social work, there are situations when only a few social work educators are involved in supporting students in their field placements. At the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), for example, involvement in field education is reserved for faculty who are fluent in Arabic due to the nature of…

The development of new e-technologies and an increased focus on developing distance social work education programs has created the impetus for social work educators to consider the tools they can employ in delivering distance courses. This article reflects on an action learning research project involving the development of an online toolbox of…

Schools of social work are increasingly offering study abroad courses as a strategy for enhancing future practitioners' knowledge and skills in serving individuals and families of diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Literature relative to such educational initiatives has focused on the characteristics, motivations, and outcomes for students and…

Distance education (DE) in social work programs and studies on its comparable effectiveness with face-to-face education continue to increase. Yet not all faculty are convinced of the results, and this study explores why. Three case studies indicate that reservations center on valuing the process of learning and nonverbal communication. Issues…

This article reports on a professional development initiative organized by two junior university social work teachers. Along with three experienced colleagues, the two teachers experimented with a professional co-development group. The purpose of this group modality, which has much in common with peer supervision, is to reflect on professional…

This article is an examination of strategies for engaging students in programs of human services education. We describe an in class mask-making activity, used by three human services instructors at an undergraduate university in western Canada, as a means of engaging students to grow in individual and collaborative awareness and skills. We present…

One of the first tasks of the Social Work Distance Education Network at the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Calgary was to review the literature and address three research questions to inform policy making and planning relating to distance social work education programming. This paper is intended to disseminate responses to these…

Video conferencing has much potential to enrich international social work education. In this educational initiative, video conferencing was used to deliver a joint foundation social work practice class to students attending an MSW degree program both in the United States and in Ireland. Student feedback indicated that they gained an appreciation…

This article explores the components of the social work education curriculum and follows the process of socialization by focusing on the student's perspective, using comparative data collected from interviews with professors and field instructors as the context for interpreting the findings. This is a longitudinal case study of a 3-year bachelor…

Team teaching in social work education usually involves sequential lectures delivered by different instructors--relay or tag-team teaching. Truly collaborative or collegial team teaching involves a committed group of diverse instructors interacting together as equals in the classroom. Having more than one teacher in the classroom confounds…

This article reports on a study designed to validate the Gatekeeping Attitude Index, a 14-item Likert scaling index. The authors collected data from a convenience sample of social work field instructors (N = 188) with a response rate of 74.0%. Construct validation by exploratory factor analysis identified a 2-factor solution on the index after…

Reminisces on teaching social work from the baccalaureate through the doctoral level for more than two decades, with special attention to comparing classroom teaching and field work supervision; provides an overview of strategies of the lecture methods which have been found to be successful; also discusses methods such as small group interaction,…