This workbook was originally created in 2016 to accompany a two credit undergraduate basic interviewing skills course at Salisbury University’s School of Social Work. The authors, who also teach the course, struggled to find an affordable textbook option for the course that was brief, relevant, and provided application opportunities to support students’ learning. Therefore, an inexpensive self-published version of this workbook was created for the course! The authors updated the workbook almost every year to reflect feedback from students, lessons learned from its usage, and changes in the field of social work. The feedback on the content and format was overwhelmingly positive. So, in order to help other social work instructors and students engage with this content the authors decided to create a free Open Educational Resource (OER) version of the workbook that launched in early 2023. We hope you find it useful and applicable to your social work education needs!

This is an article that is recommended for use in social work classes to help provide information and spark conversation about working with immigrant clients.

The abstract is as follows: In the decade leading up to 2012, approximately 8,000 Unaccompanied Minors (UAM) arrived annually at the Southwestern border of the United States. Since then, the number of arrivals has drastically increased, surpassing 14,000 between October 1, 2017 and January 31, 2018 alone. The needs of UAM concerning mental health, education, social, and legal counseling often differ from the needs of other Latinx and immigrant populations. However, recent instability in the protections and services tailored to UAM are channeling these youth and their families into mainstream agencies. This article is a call to action for social workers who may now encounter UAM for the first time in their practice. Drawing from almost twelve years of practice experience working with UAM and their families, as family case managers, community liaisons, program managers, grant administrators, and training facilitators, we review needs, services, and promising practices for social work practice with UAM. Recommendations include providing education to parents and caregivers about UAM’s rights, U.S. laws and regulations, and service availability; building trust and rapport with families; creating welcoming schools; practicing cultural openness; hiring diverse staff; and fostering partnerships with local service providers.

How do individuals and families interface with larger systems, and how do therapists intervene collaboratively? How do larger systems structure the lives of individuals and families? Relationally-trained practitioners are attempting to answer these questions through collaborative and interdisciplinary, team-focused projects in mental health, education, the law, and business, among other fields. Similarly, scholars and researchers are developing specific culturally responsive models: outreach family therapy, collaborative health care, multi-systemic school interventions, social-justice-oriented and spiritual approaches, organizational coaching, and consulting, among others. This course explores these developments and aims at developing a clinical and consulting knowledge that contributes to families, organizations, and communities within a collaborative and social-justice-oriented vision.

This book was written by MSW students as their final project for their Capstone class. Students were each assigned a chapter of the book to write to show that they had achieved competency as a Master’s level social worker. Chapters were assigned based on student interest and experience in certain areas of the field.

Here is the link to the new Passion-Driven Statistics e-book!

http://bit.ly/Passion-DrivenStatistics

Passion-Driven Statistics is an NSF-funded, multidisciplinary, project-based curriculum that supports students in conducting data-driven research, asking original questions, and communicating methods and results using the language of statistics. The curriculum supports students to work with existing data covering psychology, health, earth science, government, business, education, biology, ecology and more. From existing data, students are able to pose questions of personal interest and then use statistical software (e.g. SAS, R, Python, Stata, SPSS) to answer them. The e-book is presented in pdf format for ease of use across platforms. It can also be customized by downloading and editing the .iba file (available through the link below) using the free “iBook Author” software.

http://bit.ly/EditPDSe-book

For more information, contact Lisa Dierker, ldierker@wesleyan.edu or check out the Passion-Driven Statistics website at https://passiondrivenstatistics.com/

As an introductory textbook for social work students studying research methods, this book guides students through the process of creating a research project. Students will learn how to discover a researchable topic that is interesting to them, examine scholarly literature, formulate a proper research question, design a quantitative or qualitative study to answer their question, carry out the design, interpret quantitative or qualitative results, and disseminate their findings to a variety of audiences. Examples are drawn from the author's practice and research experience, as well as topical articles from the literature. The textbook is aligned with the Council on Social Work Education's 2015 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards. Students and faculty can download copies of this textbook using the links provided in the front matter.

This course focuses on families with members who are substance abusers, and the ways in which these families function. The course explores the methods and resources available for helping such families.

Word table that includes a selection of OERs that deal with the topic of social work.