Social work field placements offer social work students a crucial opportunity to understand better the needs of people who have experienced trafficking, and to fill existing gaps between survivors' needs and service agencies' capacity. Seven Master of Social Work students and four field instructors in agencies serving people with lived experience of human trafficking were interviewed by phone. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for themes within and across participants. Students and field instructors discussed four key tensions in their work related to human trafficking: (a) the need for rescue from forced sex work versus an attitude of positivity toward voluntary sex work, (b) advocacy versus clinical staff silos in the agency's work, (c) lived experience versus professional experience, and (d) trauma-informed practices promoting survivors' self-definition and self-pacing versus agency procedures for diagnoses and outcomes. Implications include the need for students to be trained better on the agency stance on sex work, balancing the contributions of professional and lived experience, and balancing diagnosis and timeline expectations with trauma informed self-definition and self-pacing. In the rapidly evolving field of trauma-informed social work practice, students may arrive knowing trauma-informed practices that the site agency has not yet integrated.
Trauma-informed practice has commonly been treated as a specialist area of training within the social work profession, often reserved for graduate-level courses. We contend that an understanding of trauma-including individual, cultural, and historical trauma-is central to the basic skills and professional well-being of all social workers, regardless of education or role. Many entry-level social work roles, such as case manager, child welfare worker, human and social service worker, crisis response worker, and victim advocate, are held by students entering from Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) programs; they should be prepared to understand and address the complexity of trauma within their role, including the history of trauma studies, cultural and historical trauma, skills in addressing trauma with clients, and secondary trauma. Such professional preparation can be provided by BSW programs. This study reviewed Council on Social Work Education-accredited BSW programs nationally for inclusion of trauma-specific courses in their programs, as well as conducting a content analysis of course syllabi from trauma-specific BSW courses. Themes in theoretical framework, learning activities, and topical content were identified, and we offer recommendations for trauma curriculum.
Queering and transing social work education is an intersectional, relational, and anti-colonial framework. It aligns with the goals of preparing social work students for practice in a politicized landscape, supporting queer and trans faculty advocacy and resistance efforts, and sustaining culturally responsive, anti-racist, anti-carceral, and universally designed pedagogy. Aligned with critical pedagogies, queering and transing social work education fosters critical consciousness and structural competence among all those engaged in learning and teaching. One of the ways we can work to build these abilities in our students and colleagues includes disrupting cisgender/heterosexual assumptions about queer and trans experiences through exploring the ways that human behavior/development theories, evidence-based interventions, and social work institutions serve to reinforce problematic, and at times harmful, assumptions about how gender and sexuality are embodied. Challenging the idea of a universal experience of those we serve opens the door to understanding how White supremacy, ableism, and cisheteropatriarchy work together to exclude and erase those whose lives do not fit this norm. In this article, we interrogate the idea that social work practice is neutral and explore how we can learn from and share insights about the intersectional advocacy, organizing, and coalition building that have preceded and coexisted with our discipline. We describe queer and trans social work education methodologies (e.g., power mapping, arts-based methodologies) alongside praxis, including infusing explicit and implicit curricula, shifting social work institutional cultures, including our practicum placements, and enhancing accountability and transparency.
The current study describes alcohol or other substance use specialization, certificate, and course availability in social work graduate programs in the United States. For comparison, we also describe mental or behavioral health courses given content overlap across these three areas of social work practice. In addition, clinical social work faculty teaching these types of courses were surveyed about their use of experiential teaching methods (i.e. peer-to-peer role plays and computer simulation trainings) that may enhance student opportunity for "hands on" practice in the classroom. Methods included content analyses of 313 Council on Social Work Education-accredited program websites and a national survey (N=655) of clinical social work faculty. We found that alcohol or other substance use specialization, certificate, and course availability was limited and comparatively less than that for mental or behavioral health. The majority of clinical faculty reported using experiential role plays at least often in their alcohol or other substance use and mental or behavioral health courses, but computer simulations were used rarely or never. Future studies should examine how role-play exercises are implemented in social work classrooms and explore barriers and facilitators to the use of technology-facilitated training methods such as computer simulation.
