Educating Social Workers in the Midst of COVID-19: The Value of a Principles-led Approach to Designing Educational Experiences during the Pandemic

Abstract

Social work education in Australia in the midst of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) would not have been possible under our pre-pandemic accreditation standards due to assumptions about best practice in higher education that were not possible to enact during the pandemic. Rather than immediately arguing for a new set of standards, as Heads of Social Work programmes the authors of this paper promoted a principles-led approach to inform ‘the right’ way—in an ethical sense—of ensuring social work education could continue in Australia during the pandemic. This meant conceptualising the challenges of delivering social work education in a pandemic as being not only practical but also ethical in their nature. Using examples of how this approach guided the design of adaptive online teaching and field education placements at our universities, we consider the future possibilities for ethical and rules-based governance approaches to social work education. How students learn is changing and what they are learning will help them respond to the immediate and future needs arising from the pandemic. As such, rather than having their education compromised by COVID-19, social work students at the time of the pandemic and into the future may in fact benefit from the changes that have emerged during this period.

Impact of COVID-19 on social work field education: Perspectives of Canadian social work students

“…With the rapid onset of the pandemic and the resulting disruptions in post-secondary education, many social work programs in Canada and internationally necessarily adopted technology to continue learning opportunities, including virtual field placements (CASWE-ACFTS, 2020a; Crisp et al, 2021;CSWE, 2020;Fronek et al, 2021). This sudden shift to fully virtual field education introduced new challenges and complexities for student learning (Crisp et al, 2021;Fronek et al, 2021). Canadian social work schools also faced critical issues implementing online teaching in the face of limited resources and notably short timelines to implement this shift (CASWE-ACFTS, 2020a).…”

The Importance of Connection: A Quantitative Study of Students’Learning in Placements Completed Remotely from an Organisation

“…. service audits; policy development; literature reviews; planning and conducting research projects; data analysis and organising an online conference/symposium/training event' (Crisp et al, 2021(Crisp et al, , p. 1849.…”

“…In Australia, the accreditation standards were temporarily modified to include the reduction of placement hours, application of group supervision and undertaking placement work remotely (AASW, 2020a). Social work programmes utilised these temporary amendments to varying degrees, including suspension of placements and facilitating university run e-placements, project placements with organisations, modification to face-to-face delivery and additional skills training and telehealth delivery (Crisp et al, 2021;Zuchowski et al, 2022).…”