Associate Professor California State University, Stanislaus Turlock, California, United States
Overview: This interactive workshop exposes participants to two companion curriculums designed to center human rights practice in field education. Collectively, the curricula equip field supervisors, social work field students, and field seminar instructors with the knowledge, skills, and values needed to center human rights practice in field education using systems-oriented approaches.Proposal text: Field education is the signature pedagogy of the social work profession (Ketner et al., 2017; CSWE 2015; Boitel and Fromme, 2014). Although recent years have witnessed a resurgence in scholarly and practical attention to supervision as an essential element of the social work profession (Canavera & Akesson, 2018), formal preparation for students has received limited attention in the social work literature (Fulton et. al., 2019). What is missing in social work literature on field supervision and formal student preparation is a focus on human rights practice. McPherson and Libal, 2019, suggest while the social work profession is meaningfully engaged with human rights education (HRE) and practice, there remains room for deepening student engagement in field education. Integrating human rights into orientation and training of Field Supervisors and into field seminar for social work field students is essential for assisting students identify human rights violations and develop, implement, and evaluate socially just interventions. Steen et al. (2016) suggest field placement is perhaps the most important aspect of social work education, as field is the setting in which social work students directly witness human rights violations and demonstrate human rights advocacy while applying social justice practice approaches.
This interactive workshop exposes participants to two companion curriculums designed to center human rights practice in field education. Collectively, the curricula equip agency-based field supervisors and social work field students with the knowledge, skills, and values needed to engage in human rights practice. The first curriculum focuses on centering human rights in orientation and training of Field Supervisors. The second curriculum uses a systems-oriented approach to guide social work field students and field seminar instructors in centering human rights practice field education and outlines practical field-based tasks, activities, and assignments students can complete to demonstrate human rights practice in field settings. Britton, et al. (2002) suggest human-rights concepts be integrated into theoretical models and field training.
The focus on orienting and training Field Supervisors in human rights and integrating human rights practice into existing field seminar modules using a systems-oriented approach represents a nexus between human rights competency and human rights practice in professional social work.
Learning Objectives:
Communicate the processes and purposes for identifying human needs as human rights in professional social work.
Describe five concepts from Systems Theory that can be used to help field supervisors and field students assess and intervene in human rights violations they witness in practice.
Identify three evaluation instruments that can be used to assess students’ experience (engagement, exposure, and practice) integrating human rights practice into their field experience.