Summary

U.S. President Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty by signing the Economic Opportunity Act into law on 20 August 1964. Syracuse University Social Work professor Dr. Warren Haggstrom moved quickly and secured the very first Research, Training, and Demonstration Grant in the amount of US$314,329 from the fledgling Office of Economic Opportunity. The funds were used funds were used to form the Community Action Training Center, a “first-of-its-kind program to produce professional community development workers,” under the direction of Dr. Haggstrom. This presentation will focus on an essential component of the CATC curriculum – the Legal Seminar designed and taught by noted Syracuse civil rights and civil liberties attorney Faith Seidenberg – drawing lessons from the author’s findings in the archives of Syracuse University, Seidenberg’s personal documents, and interviews with living former participants of this innovative early effort to educate and train professional community organizers. This presentation will focus on the Legal Seminar, designed and taught in the mid-1960s as an essential component of the curriculum at the groundbreaking Community Action Training Center by noted Syracuse civil rights and civil liberties attorney Faith Seidenberg – drawing lessons from the author’s findings in the archives of Syracuse University, Seidenberg’s personal documents, and interviews with living former participants of this innovative early effort to educate and train professional community organizers. This historical case study is intended to provide context and insights from past practice that are useful in the training and education of contemporary community organizers.

Keywords (separate with commas)

Community organizing, Education and training, History of social work

Summary

Social workers often hold themselves to a high stand of being able to rise above personal values, beliefs and biases when engaging in our work, but how valid is this standard we hold ourselves to?  This presentation will explore the impact of understanding our ethical responsibility to the communities and clients we serve and how using an innovation framework can support us to put clients needs at the forefront.  Confronting our personal privilege and morals at the door when we enter our work, this presentation will demonstrate how Sagesse, as an agency at the edge of innovation shone a light on our blind spots as service providers when designing, delivery and evaluating programs and care. Through this content and our personal reflection this presentation will create a safe place for people to understand the privilege and morals they bring into spaces with them, what the benefits and downfalls of these both are, and how to move forward from a place of awareness and recognition of impact.  Participants will leave this workshop with increased understanding of the ethical implications of making decisions without understanding of our personal biases and the role of innovation to support our movement forward and away from personal restrictions.  Leading with our innovation framework, participants will have the opportunity to understand the components of innovation that are engaged within our agency and community work and the impact that has on our ethical responsibility to work towards ending the social issues we are so deeply entrenched in. 

Keywords (separate with commas)

ethics, social development, innovation, adaption, moving fast, minimum viable product, industrial complex, 

Summary

Supervision plays a significant role in social work practice because the profession depends largely upon the organisation’s administrative structure, which includes supervisors to continue training new social workers and provide ongoing professional guidance. Despite the predominance of supervision within the profession, and the weight placed upon its function by policymakers, practitioners, and managers alike, it remains an under-researched area of enquiry when it comes to evidence-informed supervision policies. In South Africa, the Supervision Framework for the Social Work Profession seeks to contextualise, and provide norms and standards that guide the execution of supervision in the country. However, since its inception in 2012, no study has been conducted on how the Supervision Framework is implemented in various organisations. Hence, the aim of this paper is to report on the stories of social workers in a designated child protection organisation regarding the implementation of the Supervision Framework. An exploratory case study design was adopted. Using semi-structured interviews, data were collected from 28 social workers employed in a designated child protection organisation. Data were analysed through thematic content analysis. The findings revealed that the child protection organisation may be regarded as a best practice example of the implementation of the Supervision Framework based on the linear stories of social workers. The study found that, although the organisation under study has thrived in developing a supervision policy and implementing the policy in line with the Supervision Framework, there remains challenges related to the dominance of the administrative function of supervision within the organisation and, in some instances, lack of emotional support. Hence, the study advocates for clinical supervision which should not be combined with other middle management organisational tasks to reduce the administrative load of supervisors which has been the primarily hindrance to structured supervision in child protection organisations in South Africa and abroad.

Keywords (separate with commas)

Social Work Supervision, Supervision Framework, Child Protection Organisation, South Africa,

Summary

Over the last few years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has developed rapidly (Karakose, 2023). Within AI development, innovative technologies like Open AI's ChatGPT are one of the most recent examples of this development. ChatGPT uses natural language processing techniques to respond to user-generated prompts and generate content that is increasingly hard to distinguish as having been written by a computer. In other words, you may ask ChatGPT, a chatbot, a question, or provide a prompt, and it replies with the answer.Since ChatGPT is 'here to stay' and is gradually becoming an integral tool in our personal and professional lives, developing guidelines for how social work students ethically use it is crucial. This mixed-method study explored the perceptions of social work educators about chatGPT. The main results from this study suggest the following:Social work instructors need and want consistent college/university guidelines related to students' use of ChatGPT, which include a consistent statement on the classes syllabus and appropriate language to have conversations with students;Since ChatGPT is not plagiarism, participants suggest adding plagiarism guidelines to account for the unethical use of ChatGPT;Find a new balance: regulate the use of ChatGPT by reshaping social work assignments to be more reflective and individualized.Finally, participants made some connections between the impact of Covid-19 on social work education and the use of ChatGPT. We conclude with an invitation to foster a discussion about how to integrate ChatGPT into social work pedagogy in a positive and empowering way.\\ 

Keywords (separate with commas)

Social Work pedagogy, ChatGPT, Social Work Education