Complexity of issues increasing for social work professionals

Emily Bieber, La Trobe University

]I’m a casual social work teacher at La Trobe University, in metropolitan Melbourne. As demand for qualified social work professionals continues steadily, the complexity of the issues faced by the industry is growing.

I train my gorgeous students to be ready to tackle almost anything: homelessness, war trauma, sexual abuse, injecting rooms, palliative care, prison work, trafficking, chroming, neonatal care. I have to keep my finger on the pulse!

The heart of successful social work is decent relationships, and this extends to course delivery. I’m quietly getting used to the 'to and fro' of online versus face-toface teaching. We teachers alternate between modalities with skill and roll with the punches. Teaching online was a winner for me. I could stay home and help run the 'home school' my family was thrown into, and keep COVID-safe for longer stretches of time. But, at the cost of deeper student/teacher relationships.

The reliance on casual social work teachers is strong, as the school loses more and more funding for ongoing positions. I see my beloved bosses appear more fatigued and overworked than ever before. They plan to work while on leave, much more than I have noticed in the past. We’ve had marking time reduced, meaning my students get less feedback and that thing called 'evidence-based pedagogy' gets thrown out the window. Like my colleagues, my students’ mental health, income and personal stress deteriorated markedly in the face of lockdown.

Many of my students are six months behind on course completion, due to hold ups on beginning placements, which further impacted their well-being. It quickly became very difficult for the industry to generously host our budding social workers to complete lengthy placement hours: a paltry 980 hours per student (unpaid of course!).

The industry was under-resourced prior to 2020, and the pandemic placed unprecedented pressure on tiny NGOs and large government departments, especially our child protection practitioners.

As a social work teacher, I think my job is to help my students to keep the faith and momentum, despite the current global circumstances. My students are more vulnerable than usual and are stepping in to support the most vulnerable people. I try to show them how to love our clients.

So how do I deal with the ups and downs, and ongoing job insecurity? Laugh, cry, call the Union. Join the Branch. Fight for better work conditions. It is a fine thing that I happen to love social work, and love teaching and am backed by the Bank of Dad. I treat my permanent colleagues with respect. They have their own set of challenges, and we have to back one another.

To steel myself, I have a few nifty tricks, developed over the past four years of teaching across first-, second-, and third-year students.

Don’t get sick for exactly 24 weeks of the year and make sure none of your loved ones do either. It’s really annoying. In 2020, I lost a QUARTER of my annual income because my mum died of cancer and I chose to be at her bedside during the teaching semester.

Have coffee with your colleagues and pick their brains, or just shoot the breeze and learn that you are in the same boat.

BE a student. I am not a qualified teacher right? I have to guess how students learn. It appears these might help: humility, jokes of any quality, real life examples, props, food, icebreakers, pictures, embarrassing anecdotes from real life practice. The daggier the better, and the more passionate the better.

Say ‘no’ to stuff more often: unpaid meetings, lazy emails from students, jeopardising your own health and teaching overloaded classrooms.

Join your union. After two years of feeling like I was the only one in my situation, I met dozens of magnificent souls. They normalised my anxieties and they taught me that my time was precious. And I even got a free t-shirt!

Emily Bieber is a Casual Academic in Social Work & Social Policy, La Trobe University