Using Motivational Interviewing to Build a Value-Based and Ethically Focused Implicit Curriculum

Overview: This interactive workshop offers participants an opportunity to understand how motivational interviewing contributes to an appreciation and understanding of human rights and ethical practices, and how a value-based learning environment fosters such practices. Participants will practice using motivational interviewing techniques centered on student development of multidimensional competencies concerning human rights.Proposal text: The Council on Social Work Education defines the implicit curriculum as the environment or context in which formal learning and instruction takes place. While a social work program must design and sustain a healthy multidimensional explicit curriculum, the implicit curriculum must also be dynamic in preparing students for the social work profession. Thus, a program’s implicit curriculum must be grounded in the profession’s values and ethics while also being relevant to the professional development needs of students. Each program has an obligation to offer a learning environment that promotes and recognizes human rights and all its multidimensional components. Ethically preparing students to our profession early in their studies promotes the core expectations of challenging injustices, valuing human exchange, appreciating diversity and difference, and being change agents.

The philosophy and practice techniques of motivational interviewing can be quite useful for a creating value-based and ethical learning environment, one that promotes being trustworthy and respecting the dignity and worth of others. Motivational interviewing aligns with foundational social work theories including person and relationship centered approaches, self-determination, and the stages of change. The guided, collaborative conversation style of motivational interviewing can be used to assist a program in examining its mission and values, exploring discrepancies and conflict, assessing readiness for change, building motivation and consensus, and securing commitment to change. Using active awareness and curiosity, students can explore and determine how their behaviors are consistent with and reflect social work values. Through the creation and implementation of a value-based and ethically focused implicit curriculum, one which is framed by motivational interviewing practices of partnership, acceptance, compassion, and evocation within it, social work students may recognize and develop what motivational interviewing calls the “habits of the heart”.

This interactive workshop provides an opportunity for participants to examine their programs with respect to readiness for change and the promotion of human rights within their respective learning environments. Participants will identify the characteristics of a value-based and ethical implicit curriculum and use motivational interviewing techniques to promote social and human rights through a framework of human interchange, inquiry, and respect for diversity and differences.