College and Community-Agency Collaboration: Human Rights and Unaccompanied Children in the United States

Overview: College and community-agency partnerships provide innovative opportunities for students to learn social work core competencies. This poster presents a case study of a partnership that included a research project exploring mental health outcomes for unaccompanied children in the United States. Findings explain how these partnerships can enhance social work education.Proposal text: Partnerships between colleges and community-based agencies are important features of social work education that combine knowledge gained in classrooms with experiences in the field (Butterfield & Soska, 2013). These partnerships align with the social work profession’s ethical principle of challenging social injustice (National Association of Social Workers, 2021). These partnerships can also provide opportunities to learn social work core competencies, including engaging diversity and difference in practice and engaging in practice-informed research. The proposed poster will present a case study of a college and community-agency partnership that focuses on the needs of unaccompanied children resettled in the United States (US). Increasing numbers of unaccompanied children are migrating to the US, with 122,731 arriving in FY2021 (ORR, 2021). Unaccompanied children experience various types of trauma including community violence and child maltreatment before, during, and after their migration journey to the US (UNHCR, 2014). The partnership aimed to collect and analyze qualitative data using in-depth interviews with unaccompanied children to explore mental health outcomes. A large body of research supports the use of college and community-agency partnerships.
In their research on a university and community-agency research partnership, Teixera and colleagues (2020) found that establishing a memorandum of understanding, building trust, and establishing and maintaining clear channels of communication were three vital components of the university and community-agency partnership. This research highlighted various benefits for students and faculty. For example, MSW students learned research methods skills, PhD students gained project management and qualitative research skills, and faculty were able to collaborate between junior and senior career levels. Building on this research, the proposed poster uses experiential learning theory to describe how a college and community-agency partnership allowed for student engagement with CSWE core competencies. Experiential learning theory suggests that learning is a continuous process based on engagement with the environment (Kolb, 2014), and this theory has been used throughout social work education (Kirkendall & Krishen, 2014).
Using a case study approach (Creswell, 2013) and based on analysis of field notes, the proposed poster will describe themes that explain how a college and community-agency partnership provided an experiential learning opportunity for BSW students. Analyses revealed four competencies that emerged during the partnership, including demonstrating ethical and professional behavior, engaging diversity and difference in practice, advancing human rights, and engaging in practice-informed research (Council on Social Work Education, 2015). Results indicate that demonstrating professional behavior occurred when social work students engaged with families during the informed consent part of the research project. Students demonstrated engaging with diversity and difference in practice while listening to unaccompanied children during in-depth interviews. Engaging in qualitative data analysis helped students identify specific ways to advance the human rights of unaccompanied children in the US. Finally, students engaged in practice-informed research by applying critical thinking skills during qualitative data analysis with data collected as part of the college and community-agency partnership. The poster will detail how the partnership builds on previous university and community-agency partnership research (Teixeira et al., 2020) while also describing unique barriers presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.