Social Work Self-Care: A Reflection in Teaching during the Pandemic

Overview: In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, self-care practice is more than ever underscored for social work students. However, there is limited discussion on teaching self-care during such critical times. This proposal reflects the challenges and efforts in self-care teaching and discusses three essential teaching steps: awareness, techniques, and empowerment.Proposal text: In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the self-care practice for social work students is more than ever underscored as they face enormous stress at a personal level and endure increasing pressure caused by social and political issues as social service providers. In this sense, teaching self-care for social work students is not only about taking care of oneself but also about making a difference in a professional spirit. Yet, there is a lack of thorough discussion on teaching self-care and supporting students to take action during such critical times. Based on the teaching experiences of both authors, this proposal recounts the challenges, efforts, and reflections in self-care teaching and summarizes three essential steps for teaching self-care during the global pandemic.
The first step is to raise awareness. Although the meaning of self-care seems self-evident for the social work profession, the concept of self-care may sound distant when students are surrounded by an array of proximal demands and stressors. What’s more, the self-image as professional helpers may sometimes render students’ high self-esteem and disappointment towards themselves when failure or challenge happens (Siebert & Siebert, 2007), and in turn, making it difficult for them to take care of themselves well and seek help. Therefore, it is important to create a class environment that embraces social workers’ vulnerabilities as human beings and develops self-compassion and peer support.
The second step is to explore a set of self-care methods for social work students to select according to their preferences. We have some common beliefs in exploring different self-care techniques. First, students often have practiced self-care though not formally naming their doings as such. Second, self-care is easy to practice on small things. Third, self-care is effective when it can address specific stressors. Accordingly, we found that a few self-care techniques are particularly beneficial, such as identifying favorite things and moments that can relieve stress in daily life, developing healthy phone habits, reconsidering attitudes towards news, and reducing distractions.
Next but not exhaustive, empowerment is a crucial part of self-care for the social work profession. Rather than suppressing their feelings like sadness, disappointment, and anger, we used a variety of class activities to empower students to turn their emotions into the motivation to learn social policies and engage in social changes. Such efforts demonstrate the benefit of relieving students’ stress related to social issues and reaching the teaching goals in policy action at the same time. Meanwhile, collective efforts should receive more attention in such empowerment practice. Social work educators, program managers, and agency administrators are responsible for establishing structural supports to aid students’ self-care, especially the empowerment component, at the macro level.