Last fall semester, students and I tracked the Haaland v. Brackeen case being heard by the Supreme Court. We discussed the atrocities of the “boarding school” era, and the history of the Indian Child Welfare Act, as well as some of the challenges the law has faced in previous years.
Follow this group on Twitter! Image snapped from their Twitter feed.
One of the things we read toward the end of the semester that was really helpful was this blog post breaking down the then-current legal opinions on the case. In short, the prospect of ICWA being upheld at that point seemed grim.
But today there was good news in the policy world, and ICWA was upheld. You can read a breakdown of the Supreme Court decision here, written by the same person referenced above. It is interesting to see how some of the justices shifted their opinion over the course of the past 6 months, proof that advocacy is important and that we need to be able to link outcomes to policy. This article from Native News Online discussing the decision will be one I use in the coming fall semester. It is a good discussion and overview from the people who are the closest to the issue and a great reminder that policy shapes the lives of people, and a nation’s policy says who and what we care about (and who and what we don’t).
The anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s death was yesterday (June 6). He said “as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil”. He was assassinated in 1968, just two months and two days after the assassination of Dr. King. Both of these men at their death were committed to eradicating poverty in the US, and part of their work was in making sure people (both political leaders and the “average” American) weren’t able to close their eyes and ignore the problem.
I do think some people want to close their eyes and ignore the problem because it feels so overwhelming to try and solve. I think some people want to ignore the problem because they live in a mental place of “it isn’t going to happen to me”.
Several years ago, I developed an elective course on Poverty in the US, and I appreciate having the opportunity to teach a course with this focus (though the topic is woven into several courses in the social work curriculum in various ways). Part of my goal for the class is to address the two mindsets above (about it being overwhelming and about thinking “it won’t happen to me”). I also want students to be critical consumers of news about poverty, and I want them to know what resources are in their community. I get to teach my Poverty in the US elective this fall for the first time in several years so I am thinking through my syllabus as I have some time, updating readings and resources, etc.
The most recent “official” data on poverty in the US is the Census report that was published in fall of 2022 about US poverty in 2021. You can download that report here. There is a ton of data to digest, but I think it really useful for showing trends. This report from the Social Security Administration is a totally “in the weeds” discussion about the history of how the official poverty measure was developed, and while I have never been brave enough to assign it to students the info in this report has helped me answer many of their questions over the years.
This living wage calculator is a great tool from MIT to help students understand how much someone would need to earn to be able to afford housing, childcare, etc. Using this tool in conjunction with a discussion about minimum wage jobs and specific employment contexts familiar to them is a great tool for learning.
Another topic we discuss in class is the likelihood of experiencing poverty across the lifespan. I will write more on that in a future post, but this poverty risk calculator is a great tool for this aspect of the course.
The first couple of times I taught this course I “saved” the intervention discussions for the last part of the semester, so that we could have a big focus at the end of the course on thinking about “what works”. However, it can be a little depressing to never discuss or point out solutions and things that make a difference before week 13 of a 15 week semester. So, we sprinkle some “good news” in throughout, and one of the best resources for this is from the Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan.
I read a memoir recently called Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival by Kelly Sundberg. I hope to use it in the spring 2024 semester when teaching an interdisciplinary learning course on Trauma Studies, but if I hadn’t already missed the deadline for book orders for fall 2023, I would probably add it to my HBSE list in addition to the traditional textbook.
As the title indicates, this memoir is about the author’s experience of intimate partner violence (IPV) in her marriage. For anyone who has ever said “I just don’t understand why someone just won’t leave a violent relationship!”, this book can help you understand. For anyone who has ever minimized, or heard someone else minimize, the impact of non-physical IPV, this book will help you see how damaging it can be. For anyone who needs specific examples of the way the cycle of violence can be manifest in a relationship, you can see it here.
From a social work/educator point of view, this memoir is really valuable for all the reasons above and more. The only thing that gave me a bit of pause was at the end of the book, when the author offered some possible reasons why her husband had been violent. There were a couple that (from my reading) sounded like she was implicating her behaviors as a reason violence had occurred and that is contrary to what I believe and how I have been taught from early on in my professional career. Someone else could have a different read on that, and it could still lead to good class discussions.
I always talk about IPV during the young adult lifespan stage in my HBSE course. Most years I have taught HBSE at least twice an academic year and so have taught it at least 40 times. Never have I taught the class where someone did not speak up in class or approach me afterword about their own personal or family experience with IPV. When you think about the frequency with which this happens, this isn’t a surprise.
Obviously, you need to be sensitive when introducing this topic. The week beforehand, I always remind students that we will be discussing IPV and that they should remember to care for themselves if reading the material or preparing for class is triggering in some way.
I always think this topic is important to discuss not only from the perspective of being a future social worker or other helping professional, but also just from the perspective of being human. One of the main things I was thinking as I read the memoir was “I wish you had had a village of supportive people around you”.
One of the things we talk about in social work is the necessity of lifelong learning. When I think about all the knowledge I have now, versus when I graduated with my undergrad degree in social work, I would be in poor shape indeed without additional learning. Most of this has come in the form of reading. I love reading (as opposed to a workshop or something) because you can take in the material at your own pace and it is relatively inexpensive (or free, if you use the library). Charles Eliot said “Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.”
If you missed these books in your formal education so far, read them when you can. Some may be more of a “fit” for your work than others, but I think they all have important things to teach us, either with respect to families, child development, poverty, racism, policy history, and/or other systemic issues. In no particular order, these are the books that have shaped me in recent years (some more recent than others) and been the most patient of teachers for me:
The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (Note: this book is older, but is the best at illustrating real life human stories of abuse and neglect and impacts on development. Also provides a really good look at the beginnings of our understanding of brain science and brain/body connections)
The Deepest Well: Healing the Long Term Effects of Childhood Adversity.
My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of our Bodies and Hearts
The 1619 Project
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy
Where We Stand: Class Matters
We the Resistance
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
Toward Collective Liberation
Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital
Feminism is for Everybody
Between the World and Me
A People’s History of Poverty in the US
Educated: A Memoir
One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All (Note: the numbers/data in this book is older but the theoretical and developmental discussions are important. Also, this author <Mark Rank> has a new book out on poverty that I am reading later this summer.)
Earlier this week I was walking around a part of the city that I don’t spend much time in, and as I was meandering down a side street, a building caught my eye because of some of the graffiti on it. As I got closer to the building, I saw that one of the windows was broken and the glass was still on the sidewalk. Getting closer still, close enough to put my hand through the hole in the window, I saw a “to rent” sign in front of the building. A Google search tells me the building used to house a small business selling t-shirts with local flare. (It looks like the business is still in operation, just online and in “pop up” stores and at festivals rather than a brick-and-mortar store.)
Anytime I see a broken window in a neighborhood, I think of “broken windows theory”, which I learned about in a criminal justice class in the early 90s. The theory was interesting to me then, because it seemed so beautifully simple. (This was around the time I was also learning about Occam’s Razor so it makes sense that the simplicity of the theory was appealing to me.)
If you are unfamiliar with the theory, it is basically the idea that when signs of deterioration or decay in neighborhoods (like broken windows) are left unaddressed, it can be interpreted as a sign that no one cares about the neighborhood. This signal of disinvestment would, according to the theory, lead to even more crime and disorder.
The theory emerged in the early to mid 1980s (based on research from the 1960s) and in the 1990s it became the guiding framework for zero-tolerance policing, including the problematic “stop and frisk” policies of the NYPD. While the theory was being implemented in ways not envisioned by academics, politicians touted its success. However, it wasn’t too many years before there were indications that broken-windows policing wasn’t actually the reason that crime was declining. There is also evidence indicating the discriminatory impact and racial bias inherent in this type of policing. Another criticism of broken windows theory applied in this manner is that it is reactive, and isn’t addressing root issues in a community, particularly poverty.
Albert Einstein once said, in response to a question, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” I share this quote with classes sometimes, as a way of emphasizing the importance of a good assessment process, whether on a micro level or macro level. When I give students an assignment to do a neighborhood visit as part of a community project, I give them some guiding questions to ask. I have tweaked these questions over the years from various sources, primarily the Asset Based Community Development Institute and the section on community assessment from the Community Tool Box
What individual strengths do you see on display in the community?
What collective strengths or assets do you see present in the community?
What groups do you see represented? How are they represented?
What signs of transition do you see?
What signs of hope do you see?
Who do you see “out and about” in the community?
Where are people spending time? (Where are the green spaces? The public spaces?)
I think these types of questions help us understand a community more than the presence of shattered glass on a sidewalk. Every community has strength, whether broken windows are present or not.
For most years I have been teaching social work students, I have taught policy classes. There is an expectation of political engagement for social workers, and this aspect of our Code of Ethics is something I teach within the first week of policy class. But political engagement is something that is (should be) for everyone. As I tell my students, the personal is political, and the political is personal.
Another thing that is important is making sure that they know who their elected officials are, so that they can begin engaging with them. This is a really useful website because it can be used by someone from any location. I just have students put the address on their voter registration card, and then they get info on the major elected officials at federal, state and county levels. (The county level includes your mayor, DA, and county commissioner type people and sheriff, but doesn’t include offices like school boards, unfortunately.) https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials
Phone calls: I hate making phone calls but I had a guest speaker in class one semester who had been a staffer for a few different elected officials. They said they paid attention to phone calls more than emails and letters (and they paid more attention to emails and letters written personally than when they received 50 copies of essentially the same letter b/c it had been written by an organization and shared with followers).
Whenever I call an elected official (and last week I called 26 of them), I always identify myself by name, and by the fact that I am a resident and voter. I share my “ask” of them, usually how I want them to vote on an issue, and can boil down everything to two minutes. I can go longer if they have questions, but I am prepared for 2 minutes. The New York Times backs up the importance of phone calls as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/us/politics/heres-why-you-should-call-not-email-your-legislators.html
Tracking down how your state elected officials voted on an issue can most likely be done by going through your state legislative website and searching for voting records help. In Tennessee that’s https://www.capitol.tn.gov/help/
I have rarely made in person visits to offices of elected officials; I should probably work on that more myself. And then there is in person engagement through protests and other assemblies: a post for another day!
Sometimes in classes when we are talking about comparative policy (especially how policy in one country on an issue might be different than the US policy stance), students will ask about other countries that make decisions that lead to better outcomes for their citizens than what we currently experience in the US. Broadly, students usually ask these questions in the context of educational policy, healthcare access and policy, and gun violence.
Here are three good and fairly recent resources for sharing and discussing the issue of gun violence policy. They are from varied resources, but all reputable, and easily consumed/understood by students:
After discussing the content, you can always ask students to contact their elected officials to share their opinions and concerns. Here’s how they can quickly find their federal elected representatives: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
It is also useful to look at state legislative assemblies as well, and have students do some comparing and contrasting in class.
In the most recent post, I shared some resources I use when teaching students about secondary traumatic stress (STS). STS results when social workers, teachers, nurses, doctors, police officers and others in helping professions begin to experience symptoms of trauma because of the stories they hear from their clients/patients/students. Helping professionals may also experience STS because of trauma they might directly witness in the workplace, as well as from seeing their clients/patients/students in the aftermath of trauma.
Any professional who works with people exposed to trauma is at risk of experiencing STS, but there are factors that increase the risk, including being female, being a young professional, and having had a prior exposure to trauma. It is these factors that increase risk that impress upon me the need to make sure students understand it; I know it is a real likelihood they could experience it, depending on the specific field of practice they go into. In addition to the resources I shared in the previous post, this is a really useful booklet that looks to have been created for educators’ professional development: https://safesupportivelearning.ed.gov/sites/default/files/Building_TSS_Handout_3secondary_trauma.pdf The information on risk factors that I shared above is included in here, as well as more information on signs/symptoms of STS and some strategies for self-care. The thing I especially appreciate here is that the strategies aren’t all left up to the individual; there is an understanding that there has to be some organizational level work to facilitate and support self-care and there have to be some changes in the organizational environment.
Burnout is different; any professional can experience burnout. I have seen friends who were accountants, engineers, teachers, ministers, and–yes–social workers who “burned out” of their work. Burnout is classified by ICD (International Classification of Diseases) as an occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition. As shared on the World Health Organization website, and pulling from the ICD, burnout is characterized by exhaustion, feeling cynical about your work, having mental distance/disengagement from your work, and having reduced efficacy in your work. Here’s the link to the WHO website on the topic: https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases
I know burnout in any field isn’t going to feel good; no one wants to wake up and feel cynical about their work or ineffective while doing it. But I think burnout is more critical in the helping or people-facing professions because of the impact it has on others. Social workers who are burned out are going to stop writing their case notes, cut corners on home visits, leave their jobs sooner (which hurts clients) and more. I have seen all of these happen in places I have worked. Impacts of burnout on clients/service recipients could be even more detrimental in other settings where health and mental health are concerned.
A good supervisor is invaluable when it comes to preventing burnout. Having someone who knows how to help their colleague set boundaries, who encourages self-care, and who is supportive and available for consultation goes a long way. Reflective supervision is important as well; having space in supervision to process your responses to the work you are doing is surely a prevention for burnout.
If you don’t have a supervisor or overall work environment that encourages self-care and boundary setting, the social worker (or other professional) has to prioritize it for themselves. This was always hard for me (still is hard, to be honest) and I am grateful for colleagues then and now who helped me with this even when supervisors didn’t. As we tell our students, self-care isn’t just bubble baths and time for journaling; self-care is making time to get your teeth cleaned, to pay your bills, to call a friend, to get good rest each day. This concept of “boring self-care” is discussed in several places, but this one is specific to social workers: https://www.socialworker.com/feature-articles/self-care/think-self-care-always-feels-good/
Finally, a resource that is new to me is this FRIED podcast: https://www.friedtheburnoutpodcast.com/. I have only listened to a couple of episodes but I look forward to checking out more of them. I am especially interested in the ones devoted to burnout recovery, especially as a form of resistance to so many workplace cultures that are unhealthy.
Earlier this evening I saw a social media post from a student I had several years ago. She was writing about transitioning into a new line of work because of experiencing burnout in her social work career. I have kept up with this student over the years and I know her to be committed to service, and to be someone who works with integrity. I am sorry she is leaving social work practice in the traditional sense, but I know she will always be a social worker in the sense of looking at the world in systems, in terms of problem solving, etc. I am sorry she is leaving the profession, but I understand it.
I have a BSW and, sadly, no professor in my undergraduate program taught me about the dangers of burnout. I don’t remember the discussion of it in my MSW program either. Maybe those topics weren’t talked about then, maybe they were discussed but not by my professors. Maybe it was discussed in practice class the day I was late because of talking to a boy in the hallway and the professor locked the door on me.
Another topic I didn’t hear about was secondary traumatic stress (STS), but that’s because we (as a profession) weren’t aware of this concept in any significant way at that time.
Secondary traumatic stress is real, and it is brutal.
One of the things I try to help my students understand is the difference between burnout and secondary traumatic stress. There is negative impact of both, certainly, but solutions differ somewhat. I typically explore this in the context of child welfare class, and somewhat in the macro practice class when we are talking about how organizational culture shapes our practice but it would also fit in a micro or mezzo practice class.
I had my students listen to this outside of class and then we discussed it in class. They were interested in the degree to which an agency or organization had to be very intentional about addressing STS and working to prevent it. Some of the organizational strategies were pretty simple, like a “no gossiping” policy (so that people didn’t have to worry that being vulnerable and sharing their challenges would get them talked about by colleagues), while other strategies involved more layers of mentoring and the use of groups with an intentional structure of building resilience and emotional safety for the workers.
One of the classes I have taught most often is Human Behavior in the Social Environment, aka HBSE. I love teaching this class so much; I have standard concepts that we address each semester, but I am also able to be flexible in how I present some of the content and the sources that I use.
Depending on how the semester is unfolding, I either teach about caregiving in the section on Middle Adulthood or Older Adulthood. We highlight and discuss some of the information from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/aging/caregiving/caregiver-brief.html, and we look at some general information on resources for caregivers here https://www.caregiver.org/caregiver-resources/all-resources/. I also ask students to reflect on, and share if they feel comfortable, their own experiences with or observations of caregiving and how it has played it out in their families. And, because I teach in Social Work and we always want to have students be thinking about how they can apply material, we look at a case study and I ask them to think about how they would provide support to different types of caregivers portrayed in this link https://www.caregiving.org/caregiving-in-the-us-2020/
Teaching (toward) the Beloved Community 