A Call for Field Coordination Leadership to Implement the Signature Pedagogy

Abstract

This article presents an overview of how social work leadership skills can assist field coordinators to implement the signature pedagogy in their schools. Although this call has been made before, no other article has described specific planning steps to implement this initiative. This work fills a distinct void in the literature about this subject. The main assumptions are that (1) schools must adopt and clearly operationalize field education as their signature pedagogy and (2) field coordinators need to lead this initiative. We provide field coordinators and schools with recommendations about how to lead this important and necessary organizational paradigm shift. The article addresses social work leadership, developing a more field-centric curriculum to operationalize the signature pedagogy, shaping a school's culture to embrace this important and required initiative, and offers suggestions to proactively plan this process.

Faculty Respond to COVID-19: Reflections-on-Action in Field Education

“…Field education leaders hold multiple roles within a school of social work such as the roles of educator, administrator and clinician (CSWE EPAS 2015 ; Holosko and Skinner 2015 ; Wertheimer and Sodhi 2014 ). In keeping with the concept of shared trauma, our varied roles were compromised by personal responses to the pandemic: fear of the unknown and the stress of managing a large curriculum area and logistical operation, all while attending to responsibilities as caregivers, personal medical issues, and the physiological impact of stress in an uncertain world.…”

Citation Impact Factors Among Faculty in Canadian Social Work Programs

“…Based on the findings reported, our body of work in this area to date, and our collective experiences of 79 years of working in schools of social work in various Canadian universities for the first three Canadian authors (M.H., F.M., and J.G. ), we offer some candid (and in our minds) creative suggestions for Canadian faculty to think about—both “inside and outside of the box” to enhance Canadian research and scholarship capacities and outcomes in schools of social work in the dawn of this new “era of legitimacy.” These include: Canadian schools should proactively seek to hire deans and directors who possess both leadership skills (Holosko, 2009; Holosko & Skinner, 2015) and research/scholarship skills. Programs should stop the prevailing rhetoric harking the importance of developing their research capacities (McRoy et al, 2012) and move to more actively develop and implement scholarship infrastructures in their own schools tied to the unique demographic needs within their communities and environments. Programs should proactively develop research/scholarship cultures with ongoing mentorship for junior and mid-career scholars and students; as such mentorship has been empirically shown to be a missing ingredient in U.S. schools of social work (Barner et al, 2015; Holosko & Barner, 2014; Holosko et al, 2015). Programs (BSW/MSW/PhD) should promote more student–faculty collaborations by (i) recruiting better quality research-committed students in all of our programs, engage students in more faculty research projects; (ii) provide opportunities for students and faculty to present more research and scholarship at conferences; and (iii) explore ways that more creatively use field internship settings for student-initiated research projects (C. Regeher, personal communication, December 10, 2016). Programs should offer resources targeted for faculty training to learn the important and timely craft of grant writing, and then provide supports and incentives for faculty and collaborators to annually submit proposals for funding. All Canadian full-time social work faculty should be encouraged to annually develop designated collaborative scholarship relationships (minimally), with two different faculty individuals/departments either within their host university, or outside of their university (some U.S. schools of social work already have this as a faculty requirement, in particular for junior faculty). We were also reminded that the bibliometrics presented herein are not the only factors attributed to one’s overall academic scholarship, however, their pervasiveness in universities all over the world is widespread.…”

“…1. Canadian schools should proactively seek to hire deans and directors who possess both leadership skills (Holosko, 2009;Holosko & Skinner, 2015) and research/scholarship skills. 2.…”

Signature pedagogies: An integrative review of an emerging concept in nursing education

“…However, the authors were not opposed to the introduction of signature pedagogy within professional standards, writing 'The introduction of signature pedagogy into the social work education lexicon can serve as a stimulus and guide for change that would help the profession meet the challenges it faces' (Wayne et al, 2010, 334). Others however, have since supported the notion of field work as the signature pedagogy in social work (Boitel and Fromm, 2014;Lyter, 2012;Poole et al, 2013), with some going so far as to outline potential implementation strategies for operationalizing this signature pedagogy into the curriculum (Holosko and Skinner, 2015). Others remain unconvinced and question the evidence that field work is the signature pedagogy of social work (Holden et al, 2011) and question the validity of defining the signature pedagogy in such exclusive terms (Earls Larrison and Korr, 2013 (Earls Larrison and Korr, 2013).…”