Promoting Human Rights through Interprofessional Partnerships: Social Work and Law, Management, & Maternal/Child Health

Overview: Social work is well positioned within higher education to promote social justice and the importance of upholding human rights. This panel will feature 3 unique interprofessional collaborations in which social work infused a human rights emphasis: with law, management, and maternal and child health.Proposal text: Social work is uniquely positioned within higher education to promote social justice and the importance of upholding human rights. We center our education and work on amplifying the dignity and worth of every individual. This orientation to uphold human rights is needed now more than ever – in our training of social workers, but also in our interprofessional collaborations.

Social work programs have been called on to address human rights more explicitly within their programs (Rozas & Garran 2016, Deluca-Acconi et al., 2020), including through interprofessional partnerships. “Current violations of human rights, occurring on both the domestic and global fronts and associated with tumultuous political climates, have underscored the importance for social workers to work interprofessionally against these abuses” (Deluca-Acconi et al., 2020, p. 372).

Several scholars have suggested applying experiential learning theory (ELT) to interprofessional education (Clark, 2006; Fewster-Thuente & Batteson, 2018). This theory emphasizes learning as a process rather than a set of outcomes, and asserts that “ideas are not fixed and immutable elements of thought but are formed and re-formed through experience” (Kolb, 1984, p. 26). Kolb further asserts that learning is a continuous process informed and grounded in real-world experience and includes the stages of concrete experience, reflection, conceptualization, and experimentation. Students learning in an interprofessional team work collaboratively on realistic case examples or through real-world practice (Clark, 2006). We will apply Kolb’s experiential learning theory to 3 examples of interprofessional education in which social work educators partnered with other disciplines to promote social justice and human rights.

This panel will feature three distinct partnerships: with law, management and the humanities, and maternal and child health. The first will highlight a collaboration between social work and law in which a human rights perspective was infused in training students (both law and social work) for trips to Puerto Rico to assist with Hurricane disaster relief and Dilly, TX to assist in preparing asylum claims for individuals held in detention facilities.

We will also highlight an innovative collaboration between social work, management, and the humanities. Students are teamed in units (one student from each discipline) and tasked with using social innovation principles to address a problem at a small non-profit. The project culminates with a pitch event where student teams present rationale for funding their proposal (win a small monetary award for their partner non-profit). Recently funded proposals include a point-of-sale system for a refugee-run garment store, and a storage container that allowed an organization to build (and store) more beds to give away to low-income families.

And finally, we will highlight an interprofessional training program in which social work students participate in leadership training alongside students from a variety of maternal and child health disciplines, including pediatrics, dentistry, public health, audiology, and speech pathology. The focus of the program is centered on the care of persons with neurodevelopmental and related disabilities and emphasizes community-based partnerships of health resources, community leadership, and the promotion of innovative practice models. As a culminating activity, students participate in experiential leadership projects.