Preparing Students to Practice in an Interconnected World

Remaining responsive to the fluid context surrounding diversity and complex social justice issues requires new ways of looking at things. Gaining global and intercultural competence can help us expand how we conceive of the problems that we address as social workers and their solutions. Take UNESCO “Welcoming cities for refugees initiative,” which offers an innovative but well-grounded model for urban governance and service provision. In London, for example, the Haringey borough launched a welcome campaign for immigrants and refugees that helped influence a shift in UK immigration legislation. Global competence, according to Andreas Schleicher from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is about having the tools to “combine knowledge about the world with critical reasoning,” to “understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others,” and to “interact with individuals from different traditions, different cultures.” These are the tools needed, he says, in the work of bringing about change at the community and global levels. Schleicher, who oversees OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, and students in secondary education from around the world expand on this idea in the short video below.

What is Global Competence?
 

Video (4:02) produced by the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

Background and Introduction to the Curricular Resource  

This curricular resource, developed in collaboration with the Katherine A. Kendall Institute for International Social Work Education, builds on and complements the work of the Institute and the Commission on Global Social Work and its Councils. A world-renowned international social work scholar, Dr. Katherine A. Kendall was a strong proponent of the idea “that an international perspective is an essential ingredient of professionalism in today’s world,” that this “enlarged vision… not only permits the professional to understand better the outside world, but helps him also, to understand more fully his own national context” (An Intercultural Exploration: Universals and Differences in Social work Values, Functions and Practice, p. iii). 

This teaching resource uses literature from around the world to introduce social work students to a wealth of international perspectives on social problems and imaginative solutions and is designed to be integrated into existing courses. We use literature paired with analogous multimedia resources because it has both cognitive and affective appeal. The literary pieces serve as case studies of the lived experiences and worldviews of communities from around the world and social work responses in the context of the communities’ unique sociopolitical and cultural context. The use of literature to teach about social issues, which has a strong pedagogical and evidence base (see Literature as Exploration), has long been recognized by social work. A 1958 United Nations report on emerging subject matter and education methods for social work education included literature as a method to help social work students “begin to discover how to set about learning and speculating about social work issues” (Training for Social Work: Third International Survey, p. 296). To engage students, learning, according to the report, must appeal to both intellectual and emotional processes. Learning “does not have meaning for the individual until it is perceived and interpreted by the senses and related to [their] current background” (p. 333). 

In constructing this resource, we build on an extensive body of work on global and intercultural social work (we include readings under Instructional Materials below). The resource maps to the 2015 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards, which requires an understanding of the global interconnections of oppression for competency in advancing human rights and social, economic, and environmental justice (Competency 3).

Teaching Resources

What makes this curricular resource unique is that the Diversity Center has teamed up with Words Without Borders Campus (wwb-campus.org) to access quality international literature. Words Without Borders Campus is an organization that makes contemporary international literature in translation and related multimedia learning resources accessible to students and educators. The resources include author and translator bios and representations of the socio-geographic-political and cultural context of the stories. WWB Campus curates short-form literature, including memoirs and other narrative nonfiction and fiction. The readings vary in length and take 10–40 minutes to read. We are compiling a list of readings with particular relevance to social work and adding resources with direct applications to practice. The rich readings and multimedia resources inform treatment, service delivery, program planning, community partnerships, advocacy, policy, and other areas of social work practice across a broad range of fields. We also include an annotated list of articles on international social work approaches to learning intercultural skills. See Using This Resource for teaching suggestions.

  Teaching Webinars

 

The following prerecorded webinars provide an introduction on how to use this resource. The content is designed to be integrated into existing courses. The webinars are conducted by Diversity Center Director Yolanda Padilla, MSSW, PhD; Nadia Kalman, MA, MEd, editor and curriculum designer at Words Without Borders Campus; and Natasha Quynh Nhu Bui La Frinere-Sandoval, MSW, doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin Steve Hicks School of Social Work, who is serving as graduate research assistant on the project. 

• Preparing Students to Practice in an Interconnected World (44:16)

This video begins with the importance of teaching social work students to understand global connections. It introduces the use of literature to teach about global issues in conjunction with multimedia resources with direct applications to practice. Finally, it shows how to use of the resource and provides a teaching unit. We originally presented this workshop at the 2021 Global Well-Being and Social Change Conference. 

• Using Literature to Help Students Connect to the Lives of Service Users in the Context of an Interconnected World (39:00) 

This video is another version of the above webinar but focuses more on the pedagogy related to the use of literature. It also expands the step-by-step teaching unit. We originally presented this workshop at the 2021 European Conference on Social Work Education.

 

International Readings and Social Work Multimedia Resources 

See the detailed table with reading descriptions and social work themes for each of the readings below. We will continue to add readings from around the world.