Resumen

Ethical practice in any arena, including social work education, requires intentional and ethical development of practice across a career. This presentation conveys how to develop a comprehensive teaching-learning philosophy from articulation through implementation to evaluation and sustainment. Using literature and teaching-learning experiences, we describe a structured framework with pragmatic steps for using a teaching philosophy to inform, engage, and evaluate teaching-learning. Participants begin to apply these steps through interactive interchanges. We discuss how an activated teaching philosophy can be used to generate and maintain accountable, relevant, ethical, and meaningful teaching-learning. We describe practical uses of an activated philosophy.Faculty need resources that sustain career-long growth. Likewise, faculty face increasing challenges. Our framework for an activated teaching-learning philosophy has broad applicability for educators across careers and contexts. The framework is embedded in best practices (e.g., Scholarship of Teaching-Learning) and informed by varied contexts and teaching experiences. An integrated philosophy promotes ethical practice, ongoing commitment, engaged competency, and meaningful purpose for educators. Also, we discuss how the framework can be used to build successful portfolios for promotion and tenure purposes. We explore how the framework can be used to inform unit and university-wide activation of a philosophical approach, which supports institutional effectiveness and public accountability. We articulate a specific, adaptable framework. Critical questions and considerations for each aspect of the framework guide preliminary development of a viable philosophy. These exercises include structured reflection on and practical ideas for enacting the teaching-learning philosophy framework. We hope to provide energizing inspiration, along with pragmatic strategies, for activating a philosophy that will inform and animate ongoing practice in social work education that sustains. 

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Teaching-Philosophy, Social Work Education

Resumen

Social service workers navigate increasingly challenging working conditions. Regardless of role and context, practitioner well-being is an essential aspect of social work. Indeed, we, the presenters contend that self-care is a human right that needs reclaiming. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared burnout an emerging crisis. Professions such as social work are particularly affected. Systemically, burnout affects practitioner well-being, organizational effectiveness, community capacity, and, ultimately, sustainability of our profession. Thus, burnout is an urgent consideration. Self-care is a necessary response to addressing burnout.We, the presenters, envision a future where burnout is rare, and professional practitioner well-being is standard practice. We offer strategies toward that aim. The presentation begins with contextual considerations, including clarifying the systemic relationship between self-care, organizational wellness, and community care. Whilst recognizing the dire need for macro attention, the presentation focusses on self-care as a foundational necessity and empowering antidote to professional burnout. We underscore that self-care is an ethical imperative for competent practice. Self-care is not just a buzzword or fluffy extra. It is a crucial element of effective practice. Based on growing research and grounded practice, we conceptualize a wholistic framework and provide pragmatic strategies for effective self-care. Like any practice skill, self-care compels building competence. Sustaining competence in self-care requires self-awareness, consistent attention, realistic integration, wholistic approaches, and accountable intentionality. Our presentation provides meaningful and practical ways and resources to achieve these requirements.A sustainable future of our profession’s capacity and impact depends on promoting practitioner well-being. And, practitioners are human beings; attention to our own well-being is both ethical and essential.

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Self-Care, Burn-Out, Practitioner Well-Being 

Resumen

Social services occur in increasingly complex settings and challenging working conditions. Burnout and staff turnover plague the profession and stymie progress. These factors impact practitioners (micro), clients, organizations, communities, and, by extension, the viability of the profession. Attaining the social development goals and aims of the profession of social work requires attention to the well-being of practitioners and their working conditions.Organizational wellness involves intentional efforts to improve working contexts and conditions. By extension, organizational wellness initiatives serve complementary aims to address professional stress, prevent escalating burnout, retain an effective workforce, and support meaningful careers in social services. Based on our published scholarship, practice experience, and consultation engagement, this presentation shows how social work is ideally situated and ethically compelled to lead organizational wellness efforts. We provide a tested, explicit, and adaptable framework for leaders to use social work competencies in conceptualizing, planning, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining organizational wellness. Through interactive dialogue, participants will understand the impact of organizational wellness in the social work profession as a human rights concern. Further, they will appreciate the pivotal non-profit leadership role for social work in organizational wellness. Finally, participants will acquire an explicit framework for using social work competencies to pragmatically and effectively lead in the design and development of organizational wellness. Wholistic approaches to organizational wellness is an emerging arena for addressing working conditions. Social work is both uniquely situated and ethically compelled to take on a leadership role in this arena of social services. This presentation will provide the grounded understanding, informed perspective, and practical tools foundational for that critical leadership. 

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Organizational Wellness, Social Work Leadership

Resumen

Across the globe, social workers practice in diverse environments. Contexts and other considerations vary geographically, culturally, philosophically, and pragmatically. However, the well-being of practitioners is a consistent core facet that crosses all boundaries and applies in all situations. This presentation considers: How does diversity affect our own self-care and, by extension, our abilities to join others in social action?Social service workers have human experiences, dynamics, and stressors that affect us, including historical and generational trauma. Most social workers bring diverse, intersectional social identities that have been marginalized in compounding ways. We operate in systems embedded in toxic and multi-faceted oppressive dynamics. Self-care includes learning about how these dynamics affect clients and communities and how they affect us—in our practice roles and as human beings—and developing skills for addressing them. Fostering our own awareness, knowledge, and self-compassion helps us reject biases, offset internalized oppression, and advocate for oneself. Likewise, self-care must include celebrating the strengths of our diverse cultural identities. Dominating cultures insidiously create narratives and structures that exclude, minimize, and/or problematize diverse identities. The resilience, “ways of knowing,” and connections of diversity are strengths that nurture our well-being. Celebrating these facets of diversity iteratively restores and builds our own coping, competence, courage, and compassion. Universally, all humans need rest, nutrition, hydration, movement, connection, and meaning. Attending to these universal human elements is essential self-care. Concomitantly, we must honor our diverse identities, particular life experiences, personal circumstances, specific preferences, distinct values, and so forth. Each of us must identify both universal and unique aspects of our self-care. Respecting diversity includes being attentive to our individualized situation. When we care for selves, individually, our joint connection is stronger, healthier, more effective and more meaningful. Together, through practicing self-care, joint social action is strengthened and practitioner well-being flourishes.

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Self-Care, Diversity, Social Action

Resumen

Social work is often described as a helping profession and in the context of child protection services, the kind of ‘help’ on offer requires a high level of professionalization. According to the Romanian national statistics, in 2022, a total of 42.029 children were registered in the child protection system, with ¼ being placed in residential centers while the rest were provided different family-type services. Therefore, there seems to be a significant demand for highly skilled professionals in the child protection system whereas the social workers are of critical importance to the successful implementation of public policies and programs for children.\ This presentation draws on a recent quantitative study carried in 2022 focusing on the assessment of the social service workforce in Romania. A total of 20999 respondents participated in the survey and declared a wide variety of job titles. Approximately one third of the total sample (6814) declared working primarily with children from the child protection system, social workers being the largest professional group (25,6%). Therefore, the current study focuses on the results gathered from the 1298 Romanian social workers delivering services to children registered in the child protection system.\ Overall, several key aspects may be immediately drawn from these data. First, diversity in gender, location, and sector remains limited among Romanian social workers delivering services to children, with the workforce dominated by women and being concentrated in urban areas and in public sector. In terms of level of education, regardless of location, nearly 1:5 social workers do not have a BSW. These preliminary findings\ have the potential of providing valuable insights for the development of a comprehensive\ strategy to strengthen the workforce in the child protection services focusing on education, recruitment, continuous training, and retention.

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workforce, child protection, Romania

Resumen

En Brasil, la adopción del neoliberalismo difundió la necesidad de modificar el Estado y su forma de intervención en lo social, produjeron procesos de privatización de las políticas sociales. Entendemos que eso revelan, en realidad, una expansión capitalista sobre el sector de servicios públicos como nuevas áreas de valorización, lo que ha alterado la prestación de estos servicios y la gestión de la fuerza laboral. Los servicios públicos de educación y salud de los hospitales universitarios, que pasaron por un proceso de privatización a partir de 2011 y que continúa hoy, son administrados por una empresa pública de derecho privado, la Empresa Brasileira de Servicios Hospitalares (EBSERH), insertándolos, así, en línea con el estándar de acumulación flexible y la industria 4.0. La gestión de la fuerza laboral de trabajadores sociales se ha visto impactada por salarios asociados a la productividad, además de cambios en el proceso de trabajo con un mayor control de las actividades realizadas, facilitado por el uso de tecnologías digitales, como, por ejemplo: definiciones de las metas del servicio, exigencias de agilidad, calidad y seguridad, que, sin embargo, no están pensadas en la satisfacción de las necesidades de los usuarios, sino en la economía del gasto público. Tales medidas afectan en la relativa autonomía y dirección social de la intervención de este profesional. Así, entendemos que las relaciones de producción capitalistas, la producción de plusvalía, han predominado en el proceso de trabajo en detrimento de la garantía de los derechos sociales y la satisfacción de las necesidades sociales. Con ello, conducen a la pérdida de referencia de la salud y la educación como bien público no transable, pasando a un paradigma de exigencias de economía del fondo público y de la valorización del capital como propósito de la ejecución de estos servicios.

Palabras Clave (separar con comas)

Privatización, servicios sociales, trabajadores sociales