Students whose educational and personal development as 16–18-year-olds was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, the associated isolation, and alternative assessments are having to adapt to the challenges of higher education. Our peer-assisted learning (PAL) scheme encourages engagement and aims to overcome the stigma of asking for help and struggling alone. PAL not only supports academic development but also has a social aspect. PAL attendees typically want to push boundaries and get the most from their degree. Often the same students attend each week, so friendships begin. Social connections and positivity are good for well-being. A STEM career has particular characteristics, being team oriented. PAL promotes collaboration and communication, which encourages social confidence and more articulate interactions with others, which boost well-being. For many, the industrial placement year within the degree is their first proper job, but the application process, including being rejected, is stressful. PAL leaders, having recent similar experiences, prepare students to be more resilient for this challenge.

This fourth iteration of Voices from the Field highlights some of the many meanings and practices of assessment as faculty/academic staff, professional staff, and students define it and as they situate it in relation to students-as-partners work.The goal of this section of the journal is to offer a venue for a wide range of contributors to address important questions around and aspects of students-as-partners work without going through the intensive submission, peerreview, and revision processes.For this iteration of Voices, we invited responses to the question: "In what ways can students-as-partners work inform assessment?" Recognizing that assessment means different things in different contexts, we invited contributors to specify what definition they are working with.As we expected, people's definitions, arguments, and examples were highly diverse.Contributors' definitions reflect differences of geographical location, level (course, program, institutional), and focus or priority.Regarding the last of those, definitions include reference to teachers offering opportunity to students to demonstrate knowledge and/or skills; dynamic, mutual conversations between educational shareholders; an opportunity to honor knowledge, experience, and engagement; a process of engaging students' language, agency, selfauthorship, and self-directed learning goals in dialogue with course learning goals; instructors' and administrators' evaluations of teaching; the assessment of learning and development

In this Notes From the Field essay, we bring together clinical practice and administrative experiences to explore and anticipate the psychosocial experiences of first-generation MSW students. Our goal is to offer programmatic suggestions that reflect the strengths and challenges of first-generation graduate students in social work programs and beyond. We begin by highlighting the unique psychosocial experiences of students with a mix of brief case vignettes illustrating themes shared in clinical practice. We then outline responsive programmatic approaches including entry, first-year, and ongoing student support services within a graduate school of social work.

In this issue of IJSaP, we are piloting this new "Voices from the Field" section with a collection of contributions that highlight the importance of increasing diversity among students-as-partners participants and diversifying students-as-partners practices.Two IJSaP coeditors, Alison Cook-Sather (faculty co-editor) and Sarah Slates (student co-editor), assumed leadership for this pilot section.We have taken an approach to crafting it that borrows from some established practices in publishing in general and in partnership spaces in particular and that experiments with some new ones.The goal of this new section is to create a space to share a diversity of emerging ideas, opinions, and perspectives on important questions about partnership work.More specifically, we aim to support the voices of those who might not normally be represented within traditional forms of academic publishing and/or who do not have time for, or interest in, working through the peer-review process but who have something to say.We juxtapose authors' perspectives under categories that emerged from the contributions, and we present them with minimal editing, interpretation, or analysis so that the voices can speak for themselves, to one another, and with readers.To gather the first set of contributions, we sent direct invitations to a few colleagues and posted an open invitation on the IJSaP website and on several international listservs.The call was also shared on social media (e.g., Twitter) by some members of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) community.The invitations included this prompt: Over the next 3-5 years, how might students-as-partners work develop in a wider variety of contexts around the world and feature a greater diversity of experiences and voices?We received 22 responses from students, 13 from academic staff/faculty, and five from professional staff/administrators for a total of 28 contributions (some single authored, some co-authored).These contributors stated that they were writing from a variety of countries and regions: Australia, Asia, Canada,

Classroom-based microaggressions are a critical problem, associated with a range of negative impacts for students in targeted groups. Central to the problem of microaggressions is that they are often unacknowledged or unaddressed by educators in their own classrooms. Findings from the Social Work Speaks Out! mixed-method survey demonstrate that LGBTQ+ undergraduate and graduate students experience a range of microaggressions in social work classrooms, as they would in classes in other fields. This article draws on qualitative data to examine the experiences of homophobic and transphobic microaggressions by social work students across the United States and Canada and introduces a new tool, grounded in the data, to guide educators in recognizing, naming, and effectively addressing microaggressions in their own classrooms.

Macro social workers have consistently taken up the difficult task of articulating and refining our identity. Deciding on priorities for the preparation of students is a key component of this work. Standards and areas of focus set by our accrediting and organizing bodies (Council on Social Work Education [CSWE], Association for Community Organization and Social Administration [ACOSA]) are a great help toward this goal of continual refinement of standards and competencies for macro practice. Adding to this scholarship, our research uses practitioner interviews from a large, urban area (N = 16); our research goal was to examine the essential knowledge, skills, and attributes for macro social workers and to determine associated programmatic considerations. Findings highlight the need to honor and promote the unique disciplinary framework and philosophical underpinnings of macro social work, while also preparing students to work across multiple levels of practice and diverse disciplines.