Social Work So Far, part 2

I guess I did a post like this at the very beginning of starting this blog when I returned from my time overseas, and I wanted to do another. I did the first when I was barely into my first semester and now I am three weeks into my last. How time flies - even when it doesn't! It's been a full and wonderful year and a half since that point.

My theories of why social work is different are basically that we see the whole human and we see people with unconditional positive regard. In fact, I have a list of ideas that I think are central to social work:

• being client led
• unconditional positive regard
• holding both - possibly the most important
• person-in-environment
• social justice at the center of our practice
• ethics at the center of our practice
• speak the truth
• holding presence

and a whole lot more!

My classes so far in social work have been, as a Clinical - children and families track:

First semester:

• Practice with Individuals (with Dr. Saur, whom I loved for his calmness and attention to international social work and also his good facilitation of class discussion)
• Communities and Orgs (with Prof Taylor, who is awesome because she drops truth bombs and is a heavy hitting social worker)
• Human Behavior and the Social Environment (I so admired Dr. Dababnah for her hard work and she made this class so relevant to both clinical and macro-interested students) 
• Social Policy and Social Action (with Prof Mulhern, who was thorough and made the first half really interesting but the second half was just not for me and so I wasn't interested) 

Second semester:

• Advanced Clinical Interventions (won't name their name but she was terrible, luckily she doesn't appear to be teaching anymore (she was adjunct))
• Research (won't name her name, she tried really hard and I respected her for that)
• Groups and Families (Dr. Greif, who is UMB academic royalty for a reason and that is because he is amazing at what he does and his teaching helps you remember, absorb, and use what you've learned)
• Psychopathology (Dr. Sacco, who made this class actually interesting AND as I'm studying for my LMSW exam I'm actually remembering what he taught. I don't like the topic, really, and he made the exams hard and drove us, but it was GOOD practice and benefitted me immensely)

Summer class: I took a May intensive one-week class (also called Maymester) and LOVED it. 

• Environmental Social Work (with Dr. Burry who is also my advisor, mentor, and supervisor, and whom I adore, and only TWO other students, which was awesome! we did a cool project around environmental justice and were able to really delve into how race, class, gender, disability, and age are all affected by environment and how it plays into oppression, as well as environmental social work and what it IS exactly, as well as enviro justice and lots of concepts around public infrastructure)
• OK, this is NOT a UMB class but I took a class called Transportation 101 starting in May 2019 for 7 weeks that was hosted by the Baltimore Community Foundation and run by the Transportation Alliance (a nonprofit) and it was AMAZING. Loved it. 7 weeks of transportation speakers and then we designed an advocacy project. 

Third semester:

• Clinical Child Welfare (with Prof Wirt who really had a good sense of androgogy and how to teach concepts so that we could apply them clinically to where we worked)
• Research: In-Laws (my advanced research class with Dr. Greif who is amaaaazing once again!) 
• Social Work in Education (with Dr. Woolley who is just so smart about education and has a really good reflective listening style that I adore, also who is open-minded)

Fourth semester (won't leave reflections yet because I just started a bit ago at the time of writing this post! although I'm LOVING all my classes):

• Structural Oppression and Diversity (pilot class that I'm auditing with Emma Kupferman)
• Death Dying and Bereavement (with Dr. Woolley again)
• Housing, Homelessness, and Social Policy (with Prof Singer)

My professors as people are amazing but from a systemic side I do have to say the line-up shows a PROFOUND lack of racial diversity and this is disappointing to me and other students. As always, it does not speak to how idividual professors are - by and large they've all been great. But. Our school does NOT hire diverse faculty and we lose out as students because of it, and it perpetuates the systems we are trying to work against. 

It feels incongruous with the rest of the profession that our faculty are so non-diverse. One thing that makes me love social work is our attention to social justice issues and our continued  desire to SEEK. This is a big part of why social work felt right to me as soon as I stepped into the doorway of UMB that very first day at orientation. That first day I remember as being almost perfect and beautiful. We had this amazing lecture given by Lee Westgate about red-lining and then all these sessions that resonated with my social justice heart; I made a few new friends; and I ended up in a final session all about systemic racism with a professor I have come to admire deeply, Dr. Shaia. I had actually signed up for a different session that ended up getting cancelled, which the organizer said was the first time that had ever happened, and she helped me find my second choice which was with Dr. Shaia and talked about institutional racism. I also remember there was a former police officer in the class - it was a super powerful session and started my fangirling of Dr. Shaia.

Second semester of the social work felt a little bit draggy. I liked my classes alright but none were as exciting as the things I was learning first semester and though I loved some of my professors, I had two that were real duds. My Advanced Clinical Interventions professor cancelled class three times and barely covered the material. I don't mean to say that we didn't learn anything but I could have learned a lot more. She also said one sentence in our first class about how white people were all racist, and I got excited thinking she'd dive into systemic racism and bias in our clinical practice, and that was it. For the entire semester. Real good. My research professor tried but...it was a Thursday 6-9 PM class and it was just nahhhh. She was boring. It was also hybrid thank goodness so some weeks we didn't have in person class and this SAVED me.

But this past semester - my third, Fall 2019 - was really wonderful. Once the stress of wedding planning was over, and I just got to be married - which is in my opinion the whole point of a wedding and not the faff of the actual day, which was way too much drama and excitement for me - I settled into school and I happened to get classes that I LOVED. Also the people in them were really great too and I made closer friends. Weirdly, because they were all taught by white men, I thought I got a better understanding of institutional oppression and marginalization than I had in my second semester. I think this also had to do with my fellow students introducing concepts, speaking up, and learning outside the classroom, too. It's easy as a white student at this school to get away with ignoring our complicity as social workers in the exploitation of clients due to their race, gender, class, age, and disabilities though... I don't think we focus on it enough because we want to ignore the culture of white supremacy that keeps us in our status quo jobs. 

On a completely different note, one thing that makes me happy is all the friends I've made. I was standing in the hallway chatting with someone the other day as classes let out and literally everyone who passed by I said hi to or exchanged a few words with. Some people stopped and mentioned something we'd talked about - one student whom I'd shared a class with mentioned something she'd found out about our professor, another about a blog post she wanted to write to send me, etc. It made me feel so happy that I have made friends here, and even if we go off into the SW world and don't see each other, we are united in some way.

I've also been involved through my job and my internship in so many things, which sort of require a lot more writing and likely a whole separate post!

I have more to reflect on, so maybe I'll write more soon!