Planting seeds in a shared garden

A report from the Professional Development Committee

This past year, this committee transitioned from the wise and dedicated leadership of April Munro-Wood to the talented and complimentary leadership team of Tamsyn Brennan, RSW and Monica Boyd, SWC. We are grateful to April for her willingness to remain on the committee and provide insight and wisdom, while also stepping into a Council leadership role.

Our committee has grown quickly, and with new members comes new ideas and new enthusiasm for a new way forward.

This committee focused our efforts on a number of fronts: policy development and conference planning, as well as working to integrate our activities with the social justice committee and the decolonizing social work committee, and beginning to provide input on other professional development activities throughout the year such as the beginning of a book club.

We began our work by seeking to address new issues that emerged related to the new professional development policy that was enacted in 2022. In particular, the committee spent several months reaching out to social work colleges and associations across the globe to determine best practice regarding professional development reporting and auditing. The findings of this thorough investigation led to the creation of a policy for professional development selection and evaluation, which has been further fine-tuned thanks to member feedback and new learnings after our first year of renewals.

A central part of the committee’s mandate is the creation of an annual conference which this year is focused upon the Ethics of Allyship, in order to continue the rich dialogue and learning from last year’s conference, while also seeking to advance the College’s advocacy efforts. We sought new ways of allying ourselves with the College’s social justice committee; in addition to continuing the conversations began at their October 2022 mental health and social justice miniconference, and their annual Advocacy Day mini-conferences in March 2022 and 2023, we began meeting with them to cocreate future Big Ideas in Mental Health panels. These panels will begin in June and will provide members with professional development learnings that will also advance the College’s social justice strategic vision.

We organized the 2023 annual conference to feature an excellent keynote speaker recommended by the decolonization committee, Dr. Raven Sinclair. The conference seeks to explore the ethical implications of allyship and address the committee’s concerns as to the ways its loose definitions can lead to performativity when it comes to being an ally. The decision to centre the conference upon the wisdom of Dr. Sinclair is a decision to model allyship in practice, and to be guided by Indigenous knowledge and ethics as a philosophical framework against which allyship can be critiqued and potentially transformed as an act of decolonisation.

Last but not least, 2023 has seen the beginning of a new series of professional development offerings, in alignment with the new standards. Through collaboration with the Dalhousie Equity Committee and other community allies, as evidence in its new joint series, the professional development committee is excited to try new ways of learning and unlearning, and welcomes all NSCSW members with a passion for education to reach out and join our efforts.

The conversations that the committee seeks to promote and facilitate are important conversations that it hopes will transform us all, as we embark upon a new era for our profession – one where we seek to decolonize ourselves, our profession and our world. We look forward to the coming year with gratitude and hope, as more and more of our members are reaching out to join us in these vital conversations.

2022 COMMITTEE MEMBERS:

Doug Allen, Dominic Boyd, Monica Boyd (co-chair), Tamsyn Brennan (co-chair), Jodi Butler, Kerri Fernandez, Robyn Jackman, Helen Luedee, Jennifer Lynn MacDonald, April Munro-Wood (outgoing chair), Rajesh Patel, Jessica Pelletier, Sandra Pickerell Baker, Debra Philpitt, Basem Samaan, Claire Sampson-MacDonald, Dani Sherwood, Naj Siritsky (staff liaison), Michelle Stonehouse, Joanne Sulman, Chana Wielinga