George W. Turner

Current sociopolitical conditions of American higher education introduce profound demands on the time, energy, and attention of all educators. Scholars in fields with ethical commitments to justice, equity, and diversity, including social work and gender and sexuality studies, are especially affected, with those at the intersection of these fields multiplicatively impacted. This commentary draws upon queer temporality literature to reimagine how scholars can navigate current conditions in their pedagogy and scholarship. We illustrate how a queer temporality approach in academic social work can invite greater fluidity, multiplicity, and relationality into academic life, benefiting educators, researchers, and students.

Social work field education is strained often resulting in a shortage of quality sites; thus, demanding innovative approaches to securing practicum placements for social work students. Additionally, sexual health is rarely grounded in most social work curricula. A sexual health field education practicum placement provides an approach to address this chasm in social work pedagogy in an effort to create sexually literate social workers, and in turn, sexually healthy individuals and communities. Using queer theory, this collaborative autoethnography paper explores five social worker student practicum experiences in a sexual health field education placement. Thematic analysis was used to organize the data, identify themes, define themes, and identify relationships between themes resulting in five themes: (1) Professional Grounding, (2) Sexual Well-being is Social Work, (3) Cheerleaders and Antagonist, (4) Practicum Audit and (5) Knowledge Acquisition. This research demonstrates that a field education site specializing in sexual well-being can not only address the pedagogical challenge of little to no sexuality education in the social work academy but can facilitate student acquisition of professional knowledge, values and skills that are necessary for practice. Further, sexual health placement sites may help address an ongoing shortage of social work field education placement sites.

According to the Australian Association of Social Workers’ (AASW) Australian Social Work Education and Accreditation Standards (ASWEAS), field education facilitates student meaning-making by ‘devel...

Sessional academics are often employed on a part-time, contract basis as casual (e.g. adjunct) teaching staff. Internationally, universities benefit from the expertise and experience of these educational team members. However, there is a lack of research in the literature identifying how to support them. This article attempts to bridge this gap by presenting the mentoring (e.g. faculty development) experiences of three social work educators. Drawing from queer theory, we utilized collaborative autoethnography and inductive analysis resulting in three themes: (1) mentoring building blocks, (2) mentoring blueprint, and (3) mentoring strengths and challenges. Finally, broader implications are discussed.

Introduction: Human sexuality courses are offered at most universities. Students often bring a breadth of experiences and a need for emotional processing of these narratives into these courses as it relates to course content. The purpose of this study was to expand research exploring emerging adults’ sexuality narratives to be inclusive of positive stories. Methods: Guided by a semi-structured questionnaire, 113 students from two USA universities reflected in 2017 on their sexual history using an established educational activity asking students about their “best” and “worst” sexual experiences. Results: Qualitative analysis resulted in five themes describing their “Best” and four themes describing their “Worst” sexual experiences and one theme with dual meaning. “Best of” was highlighted by student themes of romance, beyond intercourse, emotional intimacy, listening, and safety. “Worst of” was highlighted by themes of physical health factors, alcohol and/or substance use/misuse factors, exploitation and victimization, and feelings of shame. The dual meaning theme of firsts emerged in both best of and worst of. Conclusions: Findings suggest that human sexuality courses must consider students’ lived experiences. Further, we propose a call-to-action for clinically trained mental health professionals, such as social workers, as sexuality educators. Policy Implications: Universities should incorporate sexual health education policies that acknowledge students who bring a collection of sexuality stories to learning spaces. Centering a student’s sexual voice also would support campus programs, policies, and interventions that benefit students. Finally, policies that guide professional accreditation of social work university programs to include sexual wellness content in the curricula are warranted.

Social work—an anti-oppressive, practice-based profession focused on social justice—supports people’s access to and ability to create healthy lives. Therefore, social workers should not only understand and value a service user’s sexuality, but also be able to competently navigate this area of practice. This mixed method study explored the role of social work education in preparing social workers for practice in sexual health settings. Forty-one Australian social workers and allied health professionals participated in a survey, seven of whom participated in subsequent focus groups. A descriptive analysis of surveys was conducted, and inductive analysis of the focus groups resulted in five overarching themes. Theme 1: ‘Educational Journey’ focused on the absence of content in Social Work curricula, contrasting with rich learning from peers and community members. Theme 2: ‘Disease, Disaster and Dysfunction’ highlighted that sexuality content was often framed through a deficit lens in their social work programmes. Theme 3: ‘Placement/Practice Learning’ highlighted the importance of social work field education programmes. Theme 4: ‘Being “Askable”’ was seen as essential. Theme 5: ‘Barriers’ resulted in four sub-themes: (i) Curriculum, (ii) Medicalisation, (iii) Baggage and (iv) Positioning. An overall recommendation is that the social work curricula must prepare social work students to utilise a sexual well-being-informed practice lens and more specifically to be askable. Further, implications for social work education and research are discussed.

Social work students must advance their social work skills gaining practice competencies. And, whilst practice learning takes place in field education placements, social work students often also enrol in a dedicated unit/ course whereby the teaching of practice skills is facilitated in class. A practice skills class is another learning space to imbue practice wisdom. Adjunct teaching staff are often employed on short-term university contracts to teach social work students in the area of practice skills. Whilst these practitioners can bring a wealth of experience and expertise to the under-graduate classroom, it cannot be assumed that adjunct teaching staff have formal training in curricula development nor pedagogical delivery. The goal of this article is to identify the critical elements of teaching practice skills and to examine the ways in which teaching content is delivered. This article presents the ‘teaching the teacher’ experience of three social work educators at an Australian university. A collaborative autoethnography identified three themes from the inductive analysis: (i) teaching best practices, (ii) teaching role and (iii) teaching practice skills. Finally, implications for social work are discussed and recommendations shared.