Social Work Education: Breaking New Grounds and Addressing New Challenges

This book addresses the critical question of whether social work as an universal discipline is able to respond to new social challenges that arise from a changing world that pose new sets of challenges for people in precarious situations and create calamitous psychological burden for populations. These require critical skills that need to be developed through social work education in an environment where local and global social work ethics are fused and interrogated in our classroom spaces. There is a need to address the disjuncture between curriculum content, language of text used for instruction and local realities. As a universal discipline, social work education must play a transformative role and create an enabling environment that produces graduates that are able to respond to life experiences in a global social order while also being purposeful about centering local knowledges.

Transforming social work education for a new era does not rely on singular issues but demands engagement around a multitude of issues that, if addressed, enhances the responsiveness of the discipline in different contexts. The authors, who work and teach across various settings, countries, contexts and cultures, address the role that social work ought to play during and after global events like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and war and conflict. It speaks to a social work that acknowledges our interconnectedness with nature, offering an educational framework that centers the politics of sustainable development. Social work students come from communities where they, themselves, have different levels of access to educational spaces. The book also looks at new ways of delivering education content, making social work training accessible to a broader population. Among the topics covered:

• Learning Social Accountability Through Social Work Field Education
• Online Teaching, eCourses and Innovative Programmes in Social Work Distance Education
• Teaching Reproductive Justice in Social Work Education
• Social Work Peace Studies
• Social Work Values and Education

Social Work Education: Breaking New Grounds and Addressing New Challenges addresses a range of issues that social work education needs to craft in the future and is designed to support students and professionals for practice, in placement, and teaching and curricula practices.

Annaline Caroline Sandra Keet, PhD trained as a social worker at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She has a Master’s degree and PhD in social work with specialization in Employee Wellbeing Programmes, from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. She has been in academia for 15 years working at Fort Hare University, Free State University (where she also served as Head of the Social Work Department), and is currently an Associate Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, in the capacity of Director of Learning and Teaching for the Faculty of Health Sciences. Annaline authored 13 academic publications including co-editing a book and guest editing an academic magazine. She is also co-editor of three upcoming academic publications. She has been involved in the evaluation of undergraduate and postgraduate curriculums nationally and in the region. She served on the previous executive board of the Association of South African Social Work Education Institutions (ASASWEI) (2015-2017), and currently serves as the international representative of ASASWEI (2019-2023). Her primary research interests include social marginalization, cultural trauma, working with older persons and employee wellness.

Carolyn Noble, PhD is Former Associate Dean and Foundation Professor of Social Work at Australian College of Applied Professions (ACAP) in Sydney, Australia; Emerita Professor of Social Work at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia; and Research Associate, Johannesburg University, South Africa. She is active in Australian, Asia Pacific and International Schools of Social Work Associations and has held executive positions in each of these organisations. Her research interests include social work theory, work-based learning and professional supervision. Further areas of research include gender democracy, right-wing populism, and post COVID-19 welfare state. She has published widely in her areas of research and continues to present her work nationally and internationally. She is editor-in-chief of open access social issues magazine for IASSW, Social Dialogue.