Ahead Magazine - Issue 7

AHEAD

Social Work Research and Innovation at the University of Michigan

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INNOVATIONS SOCIAL JUSTICE ARTISTIC RESEARCH THE SCIENCE OF CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS ON

THE TOWN IN THE WORLD’S MOST INTERNATIONAL CITY

M.

With great pleasure I introduce to you the seventh issue of AHEAD, our magazine on social work research and innovation at the University of Michigan. This issue looks at the commitment of the School of Social Work faculty to innovation in research, teaching and practice.

I am also pleased, with this letter, to welcome the school’s new dean, Beth Angell, a terrific booster of this issue’s theme, innovation, and of all the other projects described herein. Beth’s welcome to AHEAD readers follows mine.

Innovation has proliferated over the past few years, even as many of us have had to stay home on Zoom. COVID and innovation, it turns out, are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they have been mutually supportive! Our faculty not only adapted to pandemic communication, but took advantage of the opportunities online work afforded. Many of us now use Zoom for data collection or have created virtual spaces online for presenting research findings or created online collaboration between U-M units or between this university and others. At the same time, many highly promising innovations had to be paused for COVID, yet these are now back on track, either modified or in their original forms.

I felt that we needed to showcase all of these types of innovations, so last winter I consulted and collaborated with Associate Dean for Educational Programs Lorraine Gutiérrez to create an event at which faculty would give lightning talks on innovative projects they had devised. We received 13 submissions for these talks. Dr. Gutiérrez introduced five of them at a hybrid meeting of the full faculty on May 4. It is my great pleasure now to present all 13 of these innovations in this issue of AHEAD, starting on page 10.

One example of a research innovation happening at the school, beyond those presented last May, is the expansion of our research to include the arts. This reflects the University of Michigan’s overall Arts Initiative, now completing its startup phase. Among other things, the initiative aims to catalyze innovation, discovery and insights, especially through multidisciplinary research, and to promote the importance of arts in research universities.

At the School of Social Work, we are expanding our own artistic research, as described in the article starting on page 28. As part of the cluster hire discussed in that article, we are creating two new positions, with the hope that those individuals will collaborate with two more to be hired by the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance to develop antiracism research through all the arts. At the School of Social Work we have created the Self-Healing & Social Justice Art Collective, which meets regularly to investigate the arts as a vehicle for social justice and self-healing and to participate in arts workshops and other activities.

Two more innovations round out this issue of AHEAD Faced with a world of closed borders—or at least borders difficult to traverse without swabbing and quarantining— the school’s Global Pathways program chose not to go abroad this year, but to spend a week of study in the world’s most international city: New York. Students visited the United Nations, learned about the workings of a Queens hospital that serves the most ethnically and linguistically diverse population in the country, and much more. The reflections of Global Pathways leaders begin on page 6.

A second journey, as described on page 24, took an eclectic group of U-M scholars to a daylong symposium on critical consciousness, held in Newark, NJ. Critical consciousness—a system of thought devised by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire to awaken learners to multiple systems of oppression and to take action against them —connects back to our school’s and our university’s antiracism initiatives and innovative research. In the course of that day, however, attendees learned how to use critical consciousness in research to push back against myriad forms of oppression.

I hope you enjoy this issue of AHEAD, and I look forward to highlighting more innovations by individual faculty members and research groups in coming issues.

Rogério M. Pinto, PhD Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation

University of Michigan School of Social Work

FROM THE DEAN

Greetings—and welcome to this very innovative issue of AHEAD!

Even before I assumed the role of dean at the U-M School of Social Work last summer, I had come to appreciate the faculty’s energy, curiosity and excitement around innovative research. When Associate Deans Gutiérrez and Pinto put out a call for research innovations last spring, the results demonstrated all that excitement and the full range of our faculty’s creativity. I wish I could have seen the lightning talks at the May 4 faculty meeting, but I do have the next best thing: I can read this issue of AHEAD!

Perhaps the real measure of our faculty’s innovative thinking is this: reading about their work makes me wish I were a student again. As you look at the 13 innovations here, imagine sitting in those professors’ classrooms or working in their labs, or sitting in on planning and problem-solving sessions. Reviewing the research our faculty are conducting, I feel optimistic about our future. That may be an unpopular outlook these days. Everywhere we look—and every link we click—we see ominous signs. But in this issue of AHEAD, I find reasons to be hopeful. Imagine a world in which these innovations have not only been implemented but expanded. Imagine the students of these innovators continuing their work.

My thanks and appreciation to all our faculty for how welcome they have made me feel and how they have reached out to share their work with me. I look forward to sharing a very innovative future with them.

With best wishes—and Go Blue!

Beth Angell, PhD Dean and Professor University of Michigan School of Social Work

The Real Blue, 1998; Sam Gilliam, American, b. Tupelo MS, 1933, d. Washington, DC, 2022; mixed-media installation in four parts (U-M School of Social Work Social Justice Art Collection)

We had long planned to have some sort of faculty-led global experience for students,” says Associate Dean for Academic Programs Lorraine Gutiérrez. The school had often arranged global independent studies and field placements abroad. When a system of “Pathways” replaced traditional concentrations in the MSW program, one was a Global Pathway, for students interested in migration, displacement, poverty, climate change, global cultural differences, and so on. This Pathway was first implemented in the fall of 2020, with an international trip planned for the following summer. “Rather than an independent experience,” says Gutiérrez, “we would have faculty along, involved in group learning around what students were experiencing.”

But wait. International study? In the summer of 2021? Wouldn’t that have been kind of…impossible? Well, yes. “With the pandemic, we had to pivot,” says Gutiérrez. “Associate Dean Rogério Pinto and Prof. Cristina Bares, both Global Pathways leads, began to think what we could do here in this country in 2022 that would provide a global experience to students, including some outside the Global Pathway.”

“We are training the next generation of social work leaders and global citizens,” says Bares. “We believed it essential to have them engage critically and ethically with global communities and be introduced to human rights

philosophies and frameworks.” The ultimate decision was to take students to New York City for one week in August, 2022. The group leaders, whose personal reflections follow, were Profs. Pinto, Ashley Cureton, and Katie Lopez, who is also director of the Office of Global Activities. Home was a hostel on the Upper West Side, but the group was rarely there. Their itinerary included Elmhurst Hospital in Elmhurst, Queens, likely the most multiethnic, multilingual hospital in the country (lunch was an international food tour—tacos, Thai fried corn, Tibetan momos and more); the United Nations; Homeward NYC, where students learned about the intersection of homelessness and refugee and immigrant rights; the New York Civil Liberties Union; the International Rescue Committee; the International Refugee Assistance Project; the Human Rights Foundation; and Fordham University, where researchers spoke about global research in Uganda, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

“Students had to challenge themselves daily,” says Pinto, “to handle different political, social and cultural environments and to develop a professional stance related to global social work. Not everyone will go on to conduct global work outside the United States, but the trip gave them a taste of how it is to work in an urban setting of eight million people—what kinds of clients and institutions they will deal with. It opened up completely new horizons for them.”

“We are training the next generation of social work leaders and global citizens,” says Bares.

“

Social Work Wolverines stop for a selfie in Elmhurst, Queens, NYC.

KATIE LOPEZ Director of the Office of Global Activities & Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor

“Spending a week in New York City for the Human Rights and Social Justice course was tremendously influential for me in thinking about my future research possibilities. One morning our group spent time with four faculty from Fordham and Columbia universities. These faculty shared their research related to women’s and workers’ rights. In particular, I was inspired by the qualitative research presented by Dr. Sameena Azhar, which focused on third-gender individuals in Pakistan and India. The participant quotes that she shared to illustrate the findings were both engaging and impactful. As I code the qualitative data for my dissertation, I have been thinking about the power of participants’ words and how I can best

incorporate some of the approaches Dr. Azhar used into my own work.

“I was also inspired by the work of Dr. Charles Sanky of the Emergency Department at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. Dr. Sanky and his colleagues conducted a study focused on where hospital leaders live compared to where they work. Using publicly available data, they found that the majority of hospital leaders do not live in the same ZIP code as the hospitals they run. Furthermore, most live in much less racially diverse areas compared to the patients they serve. This straightforward, yet powerful research question and design illustrated notable differences between where healthcare leaders live and work. I am excited thinking about how social work educators could use similar approaches in our work to reveal important issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion.”

“As I code the qualitative data for my dissertation, I have been thinking about the power of participants’ words and how I can best incorporate some of the approaches Dr. Azhar used into my own work.”

Above left: Ashley Cureton and Rogério M. Pinto; Above: Dinali Fernando, MD, MPH, center, and Charles Sanky, MD, MPH, right, with students at Elmhurst Hospital; Left: Katie Lopez

ROGÉRIO M. PINTO Professor of Social Work and Associate Dean for Research and Innovation

“Having lived in New York City for many years and having conducted research in nearly 50 organizations across the city, I was delighted to see our students engage with some of those same organizations. It reminded me of the importance of student-professor research collaborations and of collaborating with communities, with those who benefit most from research findings. I was particularly touched by meeting with Jeannette Ruffins and Rosa Bramble Weed at Homeward NYC. They were both close collaborators in research I conducted in New York around best practices for implementing HIV prevention interventions.

“I also got to reconnect with colleagues from Fordham and Columbia universities, who spoke to the group about international research involving women’s and LGBTQ+ health. I had stopped my own research with community health workers and trans-identified people in Brazil, because extreme right-wing tendencies there made it impossible to continue. But hearing my colleagues inspired me to reengage with that research.

“Of course it was thrilling to me just to be back on the streets of New York, not far from where I once lived. Roosevelt Avenue, near Elmhurst Hospital, was packed,

ASHLEY CURETON Assistant Professor of Social Work, School of Social Work and Assistant Professor of Educational Studies, School of Education

“As a global social work scholar, my time in New York City inspired me to continue engaging in critical work to support refugee and migrant populations, specifically children and families. Drawing on a community-engaged research approach, my interests are related to identifying mental health and school-based interventions and supporting refugee and migrant communities. It was inspiring to hear from medical professionals, lawyers and social practitioners on how they addressed the distinct medical, legal and mental health needs of refugee and migrant groups. Dr. Dinali Fernando, an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, and Executive Director of the Libertas Center for Human Rights, shared her important work of working with survivors of torture in the New York City area with comprehensive medical, mental health, social and legal services to help them regain function

people were speaking many languages, music boomed from cars, and the number seven train rattled overhead. A Palestinian-American student shared with me her feeling of being in a huge market in Palestine, and I told her about visiting a market in my home city in Brazil. Dr. Sanky from the hospital arranged a food tour at lunch time. We sampled Thai, Tibetan and Colombian food, then sat down for a Mexican meal at Aqui en Bella Puebla on Roosevelt. All along the way we listened to different languages around us. Most importantly, we walked where the patients of Elmhurst Hospital lived and worked. The hospital is a living part of that community. At the UN I had a delightful surprise: the tour guide was a Brazilian woman. She was appropriately didactic but very open, and she asked us great questions. She really knew her stuff and made it easy for us to take in all the history. And of course she and I got to speak Portuguese!”

and restore humanity in their lives. The Libertas program is anchored in a strengths-based, client-centered and trauma-informed case management approach to coordinate comprehensive services to address the complex and highly interwoven needs of survivors. It was refreshing to hear how social workers were instrumental to the success of their center.

“As an emerging scholar in the social work field, I want to incorporate a similar approach to my research trajectory, ensuring that my research draws on strengths-based approach, moving beyond research that positions refugees and migrants as simply ‘victims.’ Like Dr. Fernando, I also hope to collaborate with a wide range of institutions, such as community organizations, schools and hospitals, to develop mental health and social support for refugee youth and their families. Prior to the New York City trip, I was not collaborating with medical professionals on developing comprehensive interventions for refugee and migrant groups. Moving forward, It is my goal to connect with them to broaden the scope and impact of our work.” n

[Editor’s Note: The title of this piece comes from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” -- “And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me…than you might suppose.”]

INNOVATE!

OUR FACULTY CATCH YOU UP ON THE WHAT, WHERE, HOW AND WHY

BY DAVID PRATT

The invitation went out last winter saying, “Associate Deans Pinto and Gutiérrez invite abstracts from faculty for five-minute Lightning Talks on how YOU are innovating in your research and/or teaching. Let us know about your BEST innovations.”

And our faculty did!

“We were asked what it meant to live the University of Michigan motto of ‘leaders and best,’” says Prof. Addie Weaver. “Social workers challenge systems of oppression, center the voices of the underrepresented and leverage and redistribute resources. All of this requires innovation.”

All in all, faculty submitted abstracts for 13 innovations, and the Lightning Talks lit up a faculty meeting retreat on May 4, 2022. (To read about Weaver’s innovation, see page 22.) In this issue of AHEAD, we proudly present the 411 on all 13 innovations, including excerpts from the original abstracts and some words from each innovator about innovating at the school and at the university.

Innovations were identified as being one of three types:

• Incremental Innovations that would build over time, their full impact felt in the future.

• Radical Innovations, the impact of which would address current issues in the moment.

• Disruptive Innovations that would challenge existing theories, methods and pedagogies.

“The Lightning Talks were community building,” says Gutiérrez. “The presenters let their colleagues know the research questions and methods they were working on. Some were innovating in their teaching, and others could pick up on those ideas and adapt them. The lightning format was perfect. I tell my students, ‘Always have a short version if someone asks, “What’s your research?”’”

“We were coming out of COVID” says Pinto. “None of us was current on what our colleagues were doing. Lorraine and I wanted to introduce some of the latest faculty research, and we had been specifically encouraged by funding sources and places to disseminate our innovations. We all came together around something we had never done before.”

“It was a great honor to present my research as part of the Lightning Talks,” says Prof. William Elliott, III (to read about his innovation, see page 13). “After I spoke, faculty in areas totally different from mine reached out to me to learn more.”

Perhaps more than anything—and it comes through in the words of the 13 Lightning Talkers who spoke to AHEAD—the event was simply uplifting. “The lightning-talk format brought fun and inspiration to our spring faculty retreat,” says Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs Joseph Himle. “I hope this is the first of many such events in the years ahead.”

A Collaborative Approach to Modifying a Suicide Prevention Treatment for Clients with Psychosis

LINDSAY A. BORNHEIMER Assistant Professor of Social Work, School of Social Work; Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Medical School

FROM THE ABSTRACT

“We used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to modify a suicide prevention treatment for clients with psychosis. We collaborated with client, peer, provider, supervisor and director stakeholders in community mental health, in addition to a panel of scholarly experts. This approach involves incremental innovation: steps of a systematic process leading to a therapeutic product. Our team modified one of the first cognitive-behavioral treatments to prevent suicide, tailoring it for psychosis and a community mental health service delivery setting.”

“Working toward my clinical license,” Lindsay

Bornheimer recalls, “I saw clients screened before discharge from an inpatient schizophrenia unit. We asked, ‘Do you have thoughts of wanting to kill yourself?’ ‘Do you have a plan for how you might kill yourself?’ I remember two clients who said no to both questions died by suicide shortly after discharge. I believe we need to look beyond traditional risk factors, like depression or having thoughts of wanting to die. We must be innovative in how we look at suicide and psychosis and in how we disseminate suicide prevention approaches to practice settings.”

Many suffering from serious mental illnesses experience stigma and marginalization. Bornheimer has engaged in community-based participatory research (CBPR), which aims to include in research those who would deliver and receive treatments. “CBPR is rare in suicide prevention and psychosis research,” she says. “Few behavioral interventions have been developed with community collaboration. You must start with those who deliver and receive the interventions in order to build something useful to clients and providers. Community engagement and collaboration in research are important values to me as a social worker.”

Bornheimer worked with Washtenaw County Community Mental Health (WCCMH) to tailor a suicide prevention intervention for clients with psychosis, based on provider experiences, client expectations and desires and on WCCMH’s service delivery needs.

Suicide risk for those experiencing psychosis can be nuanced, fluctuating and nonlinear. Many individuals with

psychosis don’t experience traditional suicide risk factors, like depression or feelings of hopelessness. Bornheimer’s research indicates that voices and delusions play a role. “We have to look at psychosis symptomatology and experiences of distress related to those symptoms—like hearing voices and feeling trapped and defeated—as contributing factors to suicidal thoughts and behavior,” she says.

In a recent study of adults coming to emergency rooms after suicide attempts, Bornheimer found that those with psychosis less often had plans to kill themselves than those without psychosis, and were also less often depressed. Psychosis instead manifests as a constellation of symptoms—flattened affect, paranoia, withdrawal and more—that clients can’t always explain. These symptoms, being internal and difficult to measure, can be hard for providers to pinpoint, especially as related to suicide risk. To account for these nuances, Bornheimer conducted qualitative research with stakeholder providers, clients and WCCMH leaders. She presented findings to scholarly experts in suicide prevention, psychosis research, intervention development and testing and implementation science, thus balancing community and scholarly involvement. All agreed on changes to the intervention in order to: strengthen suicide prevention treatment for those with psychosis; improve feasibility of treatment delivery; and increase sustainability of treatment in community mental health. Bornheimer has moved forward to test the modified suicide prevention treatment in a randomized controlled trial.

“When scholars and community members partner like this,” says Bornheimer, “innovation lives.”

innovation

The Power of Audio: 5 Reasons to Pilot Student Podcasting Projects

ASHLEY E. CURETON Assistant Professor of Social Work; Assistant Professor of Educational Studies, University of Michigan School of Education

FROM THE ABSTRACT

You are taking Social Work 680: Power in the Global Context, and assistant professor Ashley Cureton assigns you to produce a podcast. Fun, right? Certainly so, but in our interview Cureton gets right down to business. And to the educational significance.

“Self-teaching is one goal of the podcasts,” she says. “Also, group learning and independent exploration of themes from class. Students talk to real-world experts, people studying or being impacted by the issues the students are studying. I find great value in sharing narratives about why an issue matters.”

And who shapes the narrative? The students. “They must display agency,” Cureton says. Groups of students must collaborate to tell a concise, compelling story in 30 minutes, combining interviews with experts and content from class. “Being concise is the hardest part,” says Cureton. “I warn them not to wait till the last minute.” Cureton does help, though, with securing the interviews. “I reach out to my networks and tell them, ‘I have students who may contact you.’ But we also go over how to cold call and leverage being a student. Experts like to talk to students, but cold calling is a challenge.”

Technology is another challenge, but Cureton has minimized that. “I did a similar project as a PhD candidate,” she recalls, “where I had a high-tech media center at my disposal. Here, I made it more accessible. We did the interviews on smartphones and used simple editing apps.”

One group’s podcast, Do Refugees Matter if They Are not White? focused on Afghan and Ukrainian refugees who escaped to Poland. Concise, impassioned and dense with information on the refugees themselves and

on the refugee histories and policies of Poland and other European countries, the podcast included interviews with Dr. John Ciorciar of U-M’s Ford School of Public Policy and with Ukrainian refugees affiliated with Bethel Christian Services in Grand Rapids, MI. The result clocked in just under half an hour, but it could make a listener contemplate the issues for days.

Cureton hopes the podcast assignment idea will be taken up by other social work classes. “We could hold a student podcast challenge,” Cureton says. “I’m big on engaging students with applied assignments.” She would also like to create a library of student podcasts to share with the U-M community. “Students gain so much from the hands-on approach,” she says. “This is a disruptive innovation that helps them own and retain the content I teach.”

ASHLEY’S FAVORITE PODCASTS

(after those done by her students!)

Migration Policy Institute - MPI examines pressing migration issues with top experts.

Resettled - Personal stories of refugees provide teaching moments about resettlement. Ahmed Badr, a former Iraqi refugee working at the intersection of creativity, displacement, and youth empowerment, hosts.

Justice Matters - This comes from the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Host Sushma Raman explores human rights through a multidisciplinary lens.

Black Women Travel - As a Black woman who has been to all seven continents and over 80 countries for work and/or leisure, I love this fun podcast about Black women’s global experiences.

“Podcast projects allow students to: 1) develop their voices; 2) practice communication skills; 3) take ownership of a complex process; 4) learn from peers interactively; and 5) create content without expensive equipment. Instructors assign this disruptive innovation and give students skills and tools to communicate discipline-specific language to non-experts. We imagine a future student podcast channel and podcast library, available to the entire U-M community.”

Sowing Tangible Hope

WILLIAM ELLIOTT III Professor of Social Work; Director, Joint Doctoral Program in Social Work and Social Science

FROM THE ABSTRACT

“This randomized control trial (RCT), now underway, involves 1,000 families from a Children’s Savings Account (CSA) program in St. Paul, MN. It tests a policy intervention combining regular city government CSA deposits with guaranteed income and additional, targeted CSA deposits. Participants in this study are randomized to one of three groups: those receiving additional quarterly CSA deposits; those receiving quarterly deposits and guaranteed income; or a control condition of those receiving existing city CSA funds only.

“This is a radical intervention addressing poverty and educational inequality, and it is a disruptive innovation, challenging an income-first, assets-later approach; in other words, it challenges the idea that we should focus only on low-income individuals’ immediate needs rather than also addressing growth for the future. Income policies alone will never address the root cause of poverty, even if they temporarily eliminate negative symptoms—such as food insecurity or homelessness—that are associated with being poor. While income might move families out of poverty, assets empower them also to pursue happiness.”

The City of St. Paul automatically puts $50 into accounts for all its children at birth. “Low-income people have negative experiences with government and financial institutions,” says Elliott. “They may not sign up even for free money if they don’t trust the institution providing it. In St. Paul, families are in the program automatically when a child is born. Eventually they become more open to CSAs. That’s behavior economics.” Over time, the city gives families additional earning opportunities—for example, a deposit the first time they log into their CSA account, or annual deposits for participation in early childhood or financial health programs. Cities across the country have programs similar to St. Paul’s, often supported by public revenue such as parking fees. Many cities also have private partners—such as banks, or retail outlets like grocery chains that make prorated deposits into a family’s CSA each time they shop.

In this trial, about 330 of St. Paul’s CSA families will be randomly assigned to receive, in addition to the city’s regular deposits, $1,000, in the form of four quarterly CSA deposits of $250. This roughly mirrors the American Opportunity Accounts Act, aka “baby bonds,” which

proposes to open an account with $1,000 for every American child at birth. (Some states have moved on similar legislation on their own.) A second group receives both targeted CSA deposits and a “guaranteed income” for the family of $500 a month for two years. Finally, a third group is randomly assigned to a no-treatment control condition of CSA only. By comparing the effect on participants’ lives of the quarterly deposits condition to that of the guaranteed-income-plus-quarterly-desposits condition, the RCT will assess indirectly the impact of the guaranteed income. The estimate of this effect will include the independent impact of the guaranteed income and any additional interactive effect of the guaranteed income and quarterly deposits.

“Policies that feed, clothe and shelter children often come before those focused on their futures,” says Elliott, “but winning the war on poverty requires giving families a future to live for.” More and more, sophisticated CSA programs, such as Elliott is testing, will help close income gaps, and most of all will give families a better future to look forward to.

“Winning the war on poverty requires giving families a future to live for.”

innovation Use of Field Labs for Foundation Field Education

DANIEL J. FISCHER Assistant Dean of Field

and Clinical Associate Professor of Social Work

FROM THE ABSTRACT

“Social work students need extra support to prepare for fieldwork at community agencies. This innovation involves field labs, which address students’ educational needs and the changing practice landscape of the school’s community partners that host field placements. The labs include field supervision, a weekly clinical case seminar, agency shadowing opportunities, simulations and remote learning activities connected to social work competencies.”

“Many of our students come in with limited social work experience,” says Dan Fischer, our assistant dean of field education, “but they may start immediately in field placements with community agencies. We designed labs—with additional discussions, supervision, experiential exercises and shadowing opportunities—to prepare students better for social work practice and help move them through our program expeditiously and cost effectively.

“Because of the labs,” Fischer explains, “students are ready to enter field placement and engage in the learning opportunities that agencies have to offer. In many ways, the labs are like an apprenticeship model, with more faculty time assigned to support students and agency field instructors longitudinally in the field experience.”

Field agencies and field instructors would no doubt agree this innovation is needed. They host MSW students for 16–24 hours a week. Meanwhile, they maintain high workloads, deal with challenging client and community issues and volunteer their time to train and mentor our students.

Fischer points out that social workers today need the same 5,000 hours of direct practice he needed to be licensed in the 1980s (much of this comes post-graduation, in a limited license phase comparable to a medical residency). Today, more is packed into those 5,000 hours than ever. Social workers deal with more complex issues, such as rates and severity of mental health issues and

ever more nuanced understandings of systemic racism and other isms that impact clients and communities. “Yet the School has developed innovative strategies, such as our MasterTrack and 4+1 programs, to shorten the amount of time to degree,” Fischer says, “and also to reduce costs to students, who face continually rising tuition rates. We need to continue to innovate to find optimal approaches to helping our students develop the competencies of social work practice.”

To round out the required 16 hours of field work a week, the labs offer weekly two-hour clinical case conference discussions and individual supervision with Fischer, who identifies personalized assignments for each student. These may include shadowing social workers or other professionals at Michigan Medicine or at local human service agencies. Says Fischer, “Students are able to take deeper dives into clinical case discussions, engage in supervision, complete remote assignments related to clinical training and engage in activities related to ethics, professional identity development and social justice. Like other health sciences professions, social work requires continual self-reflection and lifelong learning and the field labs promote this.”

The personalized, real-world contents of Fischer’s labs do not just teach our students to be social workers. The labs encourage them to be curious and active learners, so that their knowledge, skills and capacity to be effective in their social work roles will only increase with time and experience.

Education

“Social work requires continual self-reflection and lifelong learning, and the field labs promote this.”

innovation

More than Silly Dances: Using Tiktok, Twitter, Canvas, Padlet and Other Technology in Teaching and Practice

SHANNA KATZ KATTARI Associate Professor of Social Work and Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

FROM THE ABSTRACT

“Our students communicate in many technological ways. This disruptive innovation recognizes that our pedagogies must incorporate those technologies to keep students engaged and support the requirements of their diverse practices.”

Editor’s Note: Shanna Kattari is a social media authority, so we have kept each piece of their story, told in their own words, at or below the Twitter maximum of 280 characters. The entire article can be tweeted!

“A marginalized person can curate an online space where people can’t argue with their humanity.”

“Students tell me they applied here because they saw me on Instagram or Twitter. We can market the school on social media and also showcase our research and even teaching styles.”

“My students use Google Docs to take group notes; it’s neat to watch them support each other and leave comments for me. In our online program, I can pull up a Twitter thread or drop a meme into the chat.”

“We do run into accessibility issues. Not everyone has a smartphone. Social media doesn’t feel safe to some people. Clubhouse was popular for a while, but it was all people talking, with no captions.”

“Many platforms change algorithms for who gets promoted. On TikTok, a lot of disabled, queer and BIPOC creators were shadowbanned—you see your post, but it doesn’t show in other people’s feeds.”

“I have students post Twitter threads about the reading. They’re sharing knowledge, making social work accessible and showing they understand the reading by summing it up in a few words.”

“We’re going to see more virtual reality, maybe working through CBT questions with a virtual therapist.”

“We’re always being challenged or excited by something new and different.”

“Social workers will have to hold online and in person both as valid spaces.”

“Professors don’t realize how much technology students are already using. We have to be prepared to use Slack or Discord professionally.”

“When we have younger millennials and Gen Z professors who have been doing this their entire lives, we’re going to have even more interesting conversations about boundaries, inclusivity and accessibility.”

10 APPS SHANNA USES AS A SOCIAL WORK EDUCATOR, SCHOLAR, AND ACTIVIST

Canvas (App for Teachers) Canvas for instructors! I can read discussion posts and engage with students ….Twitter (App or Website) Great for connecting social workers, scholars and activists everywhere…. Hoopla (App) lets me borrow books, movies, music virtually, from my local library….Padlet (App or Website) Anonymously upload text, images and videos to engage collaborators and co-learners….Google Docs (App or Website) Students collaboratively take class notes and comment and share resources…. Signal (App) Encrypted messaging for those wary of technology….Instagram (App) and TikTok (App) Great content around identity, social work and social justice….BetterSleep (App) Create your own soundscape. I have mixes for writing, grading and just chilling….MergeDragons (App) Need to zone out after a training or class? This fun game with cute dragons is a joy to play!

innovation Equity-Focused Teaching Strategies in Field Education

RACHEL NAASKO

FROM THE ABSTRACT

-

“How do we achieve a more just field education?” asks Rachel Naasko, assistant director of our Field Education Program. One answer is better integration of social work classroom instruction and field education. Our current field education system is not sustainable. One quarter of the MSW curriculum is taught by social service agency employees. While highly skilled and knowledgeable, they are not trained as teachers but as social workers, in which role they already struggle with budget cuts, rising rates of mental health issues, especially in the wake of COVID19, and mountains of paperwork. “With all that,” Naasko wonders, “are they teaching, supervising and evaluating our students consistently?”

To support the teaching strategies given above, CRLT had created a list of 54 ways teachers could implement those strategies in classrooms. An example, from Academic Belonging: “Communicate high expectations and your belief that all students can succeed.” From Transparency: “Let students know how you’d like them to address you.” From Structured Interactions: “Establish processes for ensuring you’re giving equitable time and attention to each student.”

With the CRLT strategies in hand, Naasko and Daicia Price, Clinical Assistant Professor of Social Work, brought together field instructors with staff from the school’s Office of Field Education. Says Naasko, “We said we would introduce equity-focused teaching, then have

them think about it in the context MSW students in the field—the placement process, interviewing, supervision and evaluation.”

Let us look at interviewing. CRLT would suggest that field faculty interview students about, among other things, successful past learning moments and learning challenges (think Academic Belonging). “Might they also give students interview questions in advance?” Naasko asks (think Transparency). Once Naasko and Price organized the interview process around the five CRLT principles and the 54 strategies, they built those results into subsequent field instructor training, saying, “Here’s how you might build transparency into the interview process” or “Here’s how you can infuse flexibility into teaching and supervision and build academic belonging into student evaluations.” Most field instructors found they were already implementing at least some EFTS.

Looking ahead, Naasko says, “We talk about having training centers. Say we had 60 interpersonal practice students placed in such a center, providing mental health care, with field faculty whose student instruction and evaluation would follow EFTS principles and strategies. We would provide services to those who could not access them elsewhere.” Clients of this center would of course benefit greatly. As would the entire social service system and the social work field placement system, both remade in a more equitable form.

Field Faculty, LEO Lecturer IV and Assistant Director of Field Education Program

“The University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) defines five equity-focused teaching strategies (EFTS): Academic Belonging (culti

vating students’ ability to see themselves in whatever profession); Flexibility (adapting to students’ circumstances); Critical Engagement of Difference (acknowledging students’ differing identities and experiences); Structured Interactions (disrupting systemic inequities); and Transparency (communicating expectations and norms to students).

“Field education connects the social work classroom to students’ work with clients. EFTS disrupt systemic inequities in the field learning environment, enhancing student learning and encouraging field instructors to create more equitable relationships with students.

innovation

The Democratization of Data, Technology and Artificial Intelligence

BRIAN PERRON

Professor

FROM

of Social Work; Faculty Associate, Populations Studies Center, Institute for Social Research

THE ABSTRACT

“The no-code movement lets those without software development backgrounds create professional data products (such as apps) and information systems without writing code, but instead using graphical interfaces and drag-and-drop.

“Our school trains students who seek careers in evaluation and applied research, but we want them to learn to create data products and information systems for practice. Using no-code, I teach students how to: automate administrative reports; move data and tasks among team members; track and schedule efficiently; develop custom project management; build websites and resource centers; analyze text data and classify images; and scrape websites to collect digital assets.

“No-code is a disruptive teaching innovation that democratizes data, technology and artificial intelligence. This gives students an advantage in the job market while providing tremendous savings and efficiencies to community-based organizations.”

“Students need to build apps and information systems to serve the social work profession,” says Brian Perron, “especially at the agency level, where overworked staff must analyze data, generate reports, manage projects and collaborations and more.” Students are excited to jump in and solve these problems, but it takes years to learn to write code, the traditional language of instructions that tell a computer what to do. “No-code gives us these new, graphical ways of building tools for managing data and efficient workflows,” Perron says. “Students are thrilled about it, and so am I.

“I see students’ ah-ha moments,” Perron says, “when they realize they can do this. It becomes more about building something cool than about learning a language. They are in a 16-month program at most. With many demands on their time, becoming proficient in a coding language is difficult. No-code tools remove barriers that have prevented students from working with data.”

How is that coding barrier constructed in the first place?

Many students enter social work because they grew up in under-resourced environments and felt excluded. The complex, sophisticated world of computing and technology may become one more thing to exclude them.

They may shy away from working with data, because it is assumed they need extensive math skills, which now they don’t. “If we remove that barrier,” Perron says, “they can do things they could never do before. They see themselves in new and different environments, instead of seeing deficits or lapses in their education.”

The University of Michigan gives great social support to first-generation and low-income students, but Perron wonders if the university is supporting those overcome by the current technological onslaught. “I don’t believe the university is creating an inclusive environment in that way,” he says. “Everybody starts out in their data journey knowing nothing about data.

I think we need to do a better job meeting people where they are. The no-code approach is a non-threatening way to build skills and solve practical problems.”

No-code has, to use a fittingly collegiate metaphor, leveled the playing field. Brian Perron’s students will become confident, enthusiastic players in solving the bread-and-butter problems that beset community-based organizations. The forces of no-code just might save the world.

“No-code is a disruptive teaching innovation that democratizes technology.”

innovation Dismantling Racism at the University of Michigan School of Social Work

DAICIA PRICE Clinical Assistant Professor of Social Work

FROM THE ABSTRACT

“To prepare students in a predominantly white U.S. institution to engage in antiracism learning and practice, a two-hour workshop was created and first presented to students entering our MSW program in 2019. We addressed participants’ levels of understanding of racism, power, privilege and oppression and explored ways to engage with understandings different from ours. This is a disruptive innovation: it challenges the status quo by decentering whiteness, considering how we tend to frame our understanding of the world and of social ideas and expectations in ways that exclude non-white identities. We hope to incorporate this content into as many courses across the university as possible.”

Some 90 percent of students in Daicia Price’s workshop completed pre- and post-workshop surveys. Responses with the highest rates of positive change were: “I understand four categorical tools of oppression [discrimination, prejudice, stereotypes, generalization - Ed.],” which had a +1.33 rate of change; “I have tools to engage with others that present with oppressive behaviors and attitudes, and I am aware of the ethical considerations specific to oppression and racism” (+0.56); “I feel I have the tools to hold others accountable with respect and support” (+0.51); and “I have language to describe racism” (+0.44).

The May 2020 murder of George Floyd was a turning point for antiracist education innovations. “George Floyd’s death made a big difference in people’s readiness to hear about antiracism and engage with it,” Price says, but she also had received support within our school long before. “We were doing workshops before George Floyd,” she says. “School leadership found anti-racism to be critical and supported it.” Other units on campus are on board with us—the university provost’s student and faculty antiracism initiatives are excellent examples— cultivating a consciously antiracist community within the university.

Price gained valuable insight into her audiences’ mindsets from years of integrating social justice perspectives into the work of police departments in southeastern Michigan. “My work with police helped me understand how we are all at different places in our growth and learning,” she says. “At the social work school, even

though leadership was committed to antiracism, it wasn’t always well supported overall, because people are in different spaces.”

Price wants her message to spread across the campus. “Social work can be a leader for disciplines where antiracism maybe isn’t their thing,” she says. “No one wants oppression, but some feel the system we have is necessary for a well-functioning society. Others want to dismantle the system for something totally different. Our surveys measured commitment to dismantling and undoing racism, but there wasn’t significant change. Some say they were not responsible for the racial situation we have, so why should they be responsible for dismantling it? Social workers must be able to have all these conversations.”

The university-wide spread of antiracist education tops Price’s wish list, but it shares that top spot with another wish: a robust and well-funded research agenda. Price has anecdotal evidence of students’ increased abilities to engage in antiracist dialogue, and she has the pre- and post-workshop data, but there has not yet been funding for a broader research agenda. Says Price: “We need more resources from the university to have that robust research.” Price the practitioner has learned many valuable skills from her antiracism work, including “Recognizing that some people just don’t know. That has been helpful to me.” If Price gets her wish, though, there will be fewer people on the U-M campus who will be able to say they “just don’t know.”

innovation

Operationalizing Critical Intersectionality in Research

BETH GLOVER REED Associate Professor of Social Work and Women’s Studies

LARRY M. GANT

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Program Director, Professor of Social Work, and Professor of Art and Design, U-M Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design

FROM THE ABSTRACT

Fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) uses configuration theory and set-analytic methods to identify conditions for particular outcomes and variations among cases with different combinations of factors. fsQCA combines a) the strengths of qualitative approaches; and b) statistical calibrations to determine generalizability of results. We use fsQCA both for small samples with many measurements per case, and to operationalize critical intersectionality in data analyses.

“fsQCA is a disruptive innovation. Rather than examine categories (race, gender, income, etc.) across cases (i.e., disaggregate key variables to examine patterns), fsQCA maintains the boundaries and uniqueness of cases using set theory, Boolean algebra to identify the logics of set memberships and Bayesian statistics for estimating probabilities. This allows us to determine what combinations of factors form “recipes” for outcomes that differ for people and environments with different combinations of factors.”

Intersectionality– For each of us, experiences shaped by gender/sexism, race/racism, ethnicity/ethnocentrism, sexual orientation (homophobia), age (ageism), dis/ability (ableism), class (classism), etc., intersect in complex ways, so that people who share some characteristics but differ in others may face different circumstances. Traditional data analysis can sort us into buckets—“Black man,” “trans woman,” “senior citizen”—and/or examine patterns among variables within larger groups. But for a study to ignore one trait at the expense of others, or to disaggregate a complex individual into separate categories, is actually a form of oppression.

Positionality– Culturally defined categories and social locations associated with different levels and types of power.

Lives and the impact of complex systems of power are defined by ever-shifting, intersecting positionalities. How can we measure the effects? “There are value systems in what you decide to measure,” says Beth Glover Reed. But how do you classify and measure those individuals who get excluded from studies because they are of some less recognizable type? “The analytic

tradition gives you categories A, B, C,” says Gant. “As we recognize intersectionality and positionalities, that tradition looks oppressive.”

Reed calls fsQCA “an innovation to capture and calibrate the complexities of race, gender, age, etc., separately and together, and in different contexts, over time.” Why the need? “Traditional qualitative methods allow us to explore complexity but don’t let us generalize beyond who you’re working with. fs/QCA lets us identify subtly differing ‘recipes’ for similar and different outcomes.”

Reed and Gant recommend fsQCA to study systems of power working together, creating inequality and advantage in differing contexts.

For example, Ragin & Fiss (2016) found that White men had seven factors that can combine in multiple configurations to protect them from poverty. White women had fewer and Black men still fewer, and Black women had three factors that configured into only one pathway. Looking at populations through the lens of fsQCA, we can identify how different combinations of factors may differ, but also whether there are different pathways to the same outcomes.

innovation Visualizing Research for the Community

FROM THE ABSTRACT

In 2020, Trina Shanks launched the Center for Equitable Family and Community Well-Being at the U-M School of Social Work. At the time, she had lived in Detroit for 17 years. The Detroit communities she cared about wanted U-M expertise and research, but were not sure how to get at it. “Our center,” Shanks says, “invited people to ask us for help, for things they might have hesitated to approach me for as an individual or to request from the university.”

Of the center’s data dashboard project, Shanks’s collaborator and data analyst, Patrick Meehan, says, “We asked what information we could put out there that might not fit in an academic manuscript, but would have value to the community.” Shanks had many community partners in Detroit. She and Meehan approached them and asked what information would be most useful to them. Two areas of immediate interest: the Detroit mortgage market and youth employment. The data was there on both, but little of it was available to the general public.

To organize, visualize and share data, Meehan used Google Data Studio, a data visualization platform that produces clear reports easily. The center also collaborated with Data-Driven Detroit, a cooperative in Detroit’s Tech Town that collects, analyzes and shares community data, and with the School of Social Work’s own web team. “A huge share of the credit goes to our collaborators,” Meehan says. The center also gratefully acknowledges seed money from U-M Poverty Solutions.

“One of the dashboards’ innovations,” says Shanks, “is showing people what’s going on right in their

neighborhoods, so they can make informed decisions.” For example, Detroiters demand affordable housing; the dashboard helps drill down, so community members see the market forces and politics at work. What reasons were most given for denials of loans to African Americans in the struggling Brightmoor neighborhood? Credit history and insufficient collateral. In historic Corktown? The dashboard shows just one application from an African American, denied for insufficient collateral.

The center is collaborating with Detroit Future City, a think tank and “innovation engine” using data to strategize for Detroit’s future, as part of ongoing conversations about best ways to regularly report relevant Detroit housing data.

The center also collects data about youth in Grow Detroit’s Young Talent (GDYT), a summer employment program based in the city. Detroit foundations, corporations and city government invest in GDYT and want to know the results. The dashboard now has 13 years’ worth of GDYT data, and includes such metrics as percentages, by gender, of African American youths in GDYT who expected to attend a four-year institution (61.3% of young women versus 38.7% of young men). “Anyone can get answers in real time,” Shanks says, “instead of waiting for a university researcher’s report.” (n.b.: Examples of retrieved data in this article were found by AHEAD in under 30 seconds.) The dashboards

policymakers, too. “Council members can look deeply into their communities and decide strategies,” says Shanks.

serve

TRINA SHANKS

Director, School of Social Work Community

Engagement; Harold R. Johnson

Collegiate Professor of Social Work; and Faculty Associate, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research

PATRICK MEEHAN Assistant Research Scientist

“The Center for Equitable Family and Community Well-Being used Google Data Studio to make Detroit neighborhood data accessible to community members through interactive online displays or ‘dashboards’. These dashboards are incremental innovations: they share Detroit community data widely in an intuitive format; they develop and share richness as more data are added; and their interactivity and ease of use lower perceived barriers between community members and researchers.

innovation Virtual Reality Innovations in Prison-Based Employment Readiness Programs

MATTHEW J SMITH Professor of Social Work

FROM THE ABSTRACT

“After release from prison, many returning citizens struggle to obtain employment—and the job interview can be a critical barrier. We partnered with the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) to implement Virtual Reality Job Interview Training (VR-JIT).

“This is an incremental innovation — a step to establish a research and practice infrastructure within a prison-based employment readiness program. The results informed us how to tailor future VR-JIT implementations and conduct a full-scale randomized controlled trial in a prison setting.”

Smart decarceration is one of the grand challenges of social work, asking us to be mindful and evidence based in how we facilitate exit from prison. The first line of the abstract above gives us a way to start: refer to ex-offenders as “returning citizens.” Social work is figuring out best practices to help returning citizens reintegrate into communities and find jobs and housing. Unemployment is a risk factor for recidivism; thus, the need for job interview training. In Smith’s study, participants are randomly assigned to practice interviewing with a virtual hiring manager, “Ms. Porter,” programmed to lead the discussion in different directions, depending upon the user’s responses. (AHEAD sat down with Ms. Porter and found that she is lovely but firm if, for example, you lead with an insistence on having certain days off.)

paused. VR-JIT is now up and running again, but time and money were inevitably lost.

Then there is the matter of recruitment. “In prison,” Smith explains, “you get few, if any, choices. So when prisoners can say no—to a research project, for example—half of them will. We have to respect that and ask ourselves how we can better inform them about the potential benefits.”

We must be mindful and evidence based in how we facilitate exit from prison.

Smith secured a pilot grant for VR-JIT, then applied to the National Institute of Justice, which agreed to fund him for five years. “We started a pilot and a five-year project at the same time.” Smith says. “We had to figure out what the projects would look like and prepare prison sites to carry them out.”

It turns out that research in prisons is not easy.

After IRB approval, Smith sent his final proposal to the National Institute of Justice. Any major readjustments had to pass through both organizations. Then came COVID. If any participant in the study or anyone having contact with a participant tested positive, the team

Those benefits may include increased interview skills, decreased interview anxiety and better odds of employment. The typical employment rate for returning citizens is 69 percent within MDOC’s tradesfocused Vocational Villages. For those practicing virtual interviewing, it was 82 percent. Smith also factored in participants’ histories, number of arrests, risk for violent reoffense and other factors, and saw a significant difference in the odds of being employed within six months. “Prison staff and returning citizens see virtual interviews as a helpful tool that fits well into their employment readiness program,” says Smith. The prison pilot study is published online in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Research

“I would like to continue our evaluation of the virtual interview training,” Smith says. “If the trial shows virtual interviews improving employment rates, how might prisons deliver the training moving forward?”

innovation Raising Our Spirits Together: A Research Innovation Increasing Access to Depression Treatment in Rural Michigan

ADDIE WEAVER Associate Professor of Social Work

FROM THE ABSTRACT

“Raising Our Spirits Together (ROST) closes the rural mental health treatment gap with group-based, technology-assisted cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) tools for managing depression. ROST uses animated, character-driven “episodes” to demonstrate core CBT skills. They are delivered: 1) on the school’s Entertain Me Well media platform; and 2) in face-to-face group discussions of the material (online or in person) led by clergy. ROST is a radical innovation that can reduce barriers to depression treatment and align with rural residents’ preferences for informal systems of care.”

Rural communities lack enough professionals to address all their mental health needs. Barriers may include personal stigma and overall low population density. Raising Our Spirits Together (ROST) uses Entertain Me Well to tailor text, images, inspirational quotes and CBT examples quickly and cost effectively to rural populations. The Entertain Me Well platform allows ROST to create animated episodes relevant to the rural setting and to discussion with clergy. These character-driven episodes, starring Billi, a bright turquoise balloon, deliver core CBT content. In one episode, Billi relates her experiences with depression and how she improved her mood through CBT strategies, such as taking action (behavioral activation), talking back to her negative thoughts (cognitive restructuring) and problem-solving.

Addie Weaver and her team knew from the literature that human touch points could enhance technology-based work. So, after deep collaboration and discussion with rural Michigan communities, they chose to connect the program to churches. “Rural clergy were already offering de facto mental health services,” says Weaver, “due to the lack of providers in rural settings and rural folks’ comfort with more informal systems of care. Clergy are trusted community people; it made sense to have them facilitate discussions of the material.” ROST thus brings people together online and gives them access to resources they wouldn’t otherwise have. (ROST’s interpersonal element

went virtual at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic; it is now transitioning back to face-to-face.) Weaver’s team has found engagement among participants randomized to ROST to be very high, with about half of participants completing all eight sessions and about 80 percent completing at least six of the eight.

“We are not replacing human interaction,” Weaver takes care to note. “We actually hope to add peer-to-peer interactions.” Weaver would like to expand ROST across rural Michigan and even beyond. She points out that the model could easily be replicated in rural community settings such as libraries or 4-H meetings. She looks to create more diverse episode storylines, and to enhance accessibility with captioning and translation features.

On the way to expanding ROST, Weaver and her team must contend with another reality of rural America: poor Internet access. In 2009, under President Obama, broadband expanded in rural areas, but Weaver wants more. “I want the Internet to be seen as a public utility to which everyone is entitled access,” she says. “That would be a game changer, in terms of rural employment and education. There is a legitimate feeling among rural folks of being left behind. There is little interaction between rural communities and suburbs and cities, so there is distrust between those groups. High-speed Internet could help with that.”

“Clergy are trusted community people; it made sense to have them facilitate.”

innovation

Inclusion of Persons Identifying as Sex or Gender Minorities in Cancer Research Trials

Work

FROM THE ABSTRACT

Researchers can now distinguish certain biomarkers, that is, molecules in body fluids or tissues that may signal a disease, such as cancer, and predict the risk of certain outcomes. Biomarkers are subject to social and environmental influences, such as poverty, isolation and trauma. Zebrack’s team hypothesizes that study participants with worse disease outcomes will be those with gene behaviors that constitute responses to stress.

“AYAs claiming sex or gender minority (SGM) status face stressors whose impact on cancer incidence and trajectory is not entirely known,” says Anao Zhang. “We hope to develop psychosocial interventions targeting unique biopsychosocial conditions that shape SGM AYA experience.”

“It is the classic model of social determinants of health,” says Zebrack, “predicting risks for negative health outcomes and explaining disparities in those outcomes. We will see if, with cancer, the gene behavior follows this social-biological mechanism seen in other disease categories.”

Zebrack’s team is using the NCI Community Oncology Research Program, a clinical trials network comprising hundreds of cancer centers across the country. But to help ensure diversity, they are also drawing from community centers, which serve populations more diverse in terms of income, race and ethnicity, family composition and population density and geography. Historian Ibn Khakldun said “geography is destiny,” but one might substitute many words in that phrase.

The team is specific and nuanced with questions about sex, sexual orientation and gender identity, as well as questions about race. “We want young people to see themselves in our survey, and we want them to know that we, as scientists, see them,” Zebrack says. “Approximately 15 percent of people between 18 and 39 identify as a sexual or gender minority, so we can develop realistic, bottom-up identification and recruitment approaches that are sensitive to those individuals. We have engaged a young, diverse patient engagement team that includes individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ and as cancer survivors.”

Alas, bottom-up researchers can run up against top-down restrictions. Policymakers specify what language one can and cannot use in research. If the NIH or NCI limits gender choices to “male” and “female,” a researcher cannot know what baseline to use for those identifying as nonbinary or transgender. “Our inclusion strategies are proactive,” Zebrack says. “That is part of our innovation.

“These folks come with enormous histories of trauma with the health care system, even just around visits to their GPs. So I must demonstrate that I am a trustworthy scientist, and that my team is trustworthy so that study participants will feel comfortable engaging with us.”

Nina Jackson Levin points out that this study has an exciting flip side. “Focusing on LGBTQ+ young people,” she says, “will reveal resilience that this group possesses. This is just as important as focusing on their challenges.”n

BRADLEY J. ZEBRACK, Professor of Social

ANAO ZHANG, Assistant Professor of Social Work

NINA JACKSON LEVIN, PhD Candidate in Social Work and Anthropology, National Cancer Institute T32 Fellow in the U-M Rogel Cancer Center

“Our study, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) examines genomic pathways through which psychosocial and environmental risk and resilience factors influence gene regulation and thus health outcomes among adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer survivors. We will develop and evaluate strategies for recruitment and retention of AYA cancer patients who claim minoritized sexual orientation or gender identities.

Conscientização in a Proud and Close-Knit Community

BY DAVID PRATT

“I think Newark has been [a crossroads for] every generation in the fight to achieve America. And I think Newark is at that crossroads still.”

– U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, NJ, 2006–2013

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates (attrib.)

Top-down models of education, said Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997), “turn students into receiving objects.” Such models control thought and action and inhibit creative power, leaving students little choice but just to accept their circumstances. Freire’s response was critical consciousness (Port. conscientização), a system of thought that calls us to examine the social and political oppressions that shape our lives, and to take action against them. Critical consciousness, Freire said, gives us “the ability to intervene in reality in order to change it.”

Does the practice of critical consciousness truly change thought and action? In 2010, Liliane Cambraia Windsor, then a professor of social work at Rutgers, New Jersey’s state university, in Newark, convened a community collaborative board, following the model articulated by

her mentor and collaborator Rogério M. Pinto, then at Columbia Social Work in New York City. This Collaborative Board has overseen all the research that Windsor and Pinto have conducted since. With Ellen Benoit, PhD, a researcher at the North Jersey Community Research Initiative (NJCRI) in Newark’s Third Ward, Windsor and Pinto would conduct a project, Community Wise, funded by an NIH R01. Community Wise would engage local individuals with histories of incarceration and drug use in interactive “critical dialogues”—precursors, in Freire’s scheme, of each individual’s development of critical consciousness.

Freire often began critical dialogues by showing participants simple drawings—called “pictographs” or “generative images”—that suggested oppressive power relationships. Innovatively, Windsor et al. commissioned six paintings that illustrated six sets of oppressions, in order to provoke dialogues among participants on their socioeconomic positionalities. The investigators ultimately saw behavior change related to drug use, prison recidivism and personal awareness, based on these dialogues. Says Windsor, “So many people made tremendous| progress in extending the way they viewed the world and themselves and gained a better understanding of oppression.” Critical consciousness and critical dialogues had shown great potential to be valuable community research tools.

In October, 2022, Windsor and Pinto, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Michigan, respectively, joined Benoit at NJCRI in Newark to host a lecture on critical consciousness. The speakers were Carlos Alberto Torres, once Freire’s student and now a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his wife, Ana Elvira Steinbach Torres, former associate professor at the Universidade Federal da Paraíba in João Pessoa, Brazil. With Pinto came U-M postdoctoral fellow Carol A. Lee, one of Windsor’s mentees and now a postdoctoral research fellow at the U-M Department of Psychiatry; Evan Hall, LS&A ’23 and Isabella Bonnewit, LS&A ’24, both Biology, Health, and Society majors and researchers in U-M’s Student Opportunities for AIDS/HIV Research program (Isabella also majors in Social Theory and Practice); and Emerson Granillo, a student at U-M’s Stamps School of Art and Design.

NJCRI, the site of the original Community Wise dialogues, made a fitting and thought-provoking site for exploring critical consciousness. NJCRI provides psychosocial services, primary medical care, prison discharge services, access to a homeless drop-in center and much more to 11,000 clients annually. Many attendees of the

Torreses’ lecture were clients and/or staff of NJCRI and had participated in those original dialogues. “Gathering at a community-based organization exemplified a key principle of community engaged research,” says Pinto. “People from many walks of life came together to learn in even greater depth about the principles underlying a study that had taken place in that very room.”

There was great resonance, too, in the city that birthed Community Wise and that embraced the Torreses’ talk.

Located just five miles west of New York City’s financial district, Newark was, in the mid-20th century, a busy industrial center. By the mid1960s, though, it had lost its manufacturing base and experienced waves of “white flight.” It became a majorityBlack city, ruled by white politicians. In the summer of 1967, white police officers arrested and beat a Black cab driver, and Newark erupted in riots, costing the city $10 million. More white exodus followed. Those who remained struggled to rebuild.

Today, industry and light manufacturing have made a comeback in Newark. The population stands at 307,000, up from 275,000 in 1990 but less than the post-World

Critical consciousness gives us “the ability to intervene in reality in order to change it.”

Carlos Torres and Ana Torres (left) speak on critical consciousness at the North Jersey Community Research Initiative.

At the end of the day, one last Arrasou! (“Hurrah!”) for conscientização

War II peak of 438,000. Half of Newarkers in 2022 are African American/Black, 37 percent are Latinx, and one quarter are white. Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, is Black, and the city council is entirely Black and Latinx. Windsor lived in Newark with her family when she was at Rutgers. “It is a special place,” she says. “There are strong leaders turning the city around and an incredibly active, proud and close-knit community who have been fighting for their city for generations.”

The day of critical consciousness in Newark began with Torres outlining the evolution of Freire’s thinking. All social relationships, Torres said, include hidden moments of domination. One type of consciousness, the “ingenuous” type, accepts reality as inevitable, without seeking its causes in those moments of domination; the

other type, critical consciousness, is continuously open to question and thus open to uncovering—and acting against—the forces of domination. Critical consciousness is an awakening, an individual’s rigorous reading of how society works and of the individual’s relationship to power. This awakening can defeat forces that would dominate by mythologizing reality (think of almost any corporate or political slogan), thus destroying creativity and destroying consciousness itself. Where would

Newark, NJ be, one wonders, had Windsor’s “active, proud, close-knit community,” though perhaps unaware of critical consciousness, not awakened and fought for their city? Where would the formerly incarcerated participants in Community Wise be had they not opened up and understood and discussed the oppressive forces acting on their lives?

After Torres spoke, Community Wise itself became the focus of the afternoon session. Windsor, Pinto and Benoit led their audience through the Community Wise intervention, including the six generative images of oppression commissioned from American artist Christopher Burkle (b. 1971), and statistics and quotes that demonstrated the design, use and success of critical dialogues

“I have an obligation as a researcher to enact critical consciousness for myself.”

Carlos Torres

in changing participants’ minds and lives. The investigators told how, based on the success of Community Wise, they applied for and received a second R01 for a modified critical dialogue intervention, using one of the six paintings, to promote protective behaviors around COVID-19. They have now received a third R01 to extend the second, but with participants from East St. Louis, IL (a day’s round trip from Windsor’s office with a 97% Black/African American population). This study is increasing the sample, and data collection will extend beyond the initial intervention.

“It was amazing that we brought together this diverse group of people in Newark,” Pinto says. “It was a great thing to do, and everyone was so open.” The Torreses drew rave reviews. “It was an honor meeting one of Paulo Freire’s mentees,” said Carol Lee, “and to learn his theories are being used to build foundations for critical global citizenship education.” Said Evan Hall, “I learned that I have a continuing obligation as a researcher to enact critical consciousness for myself, to ask the necessary questions to guide multifaceted solutions in practice.”

Pinto and Windsor were pleased as well. “It was the perfect environment to study critical consciousness, an environment of trust and vulnerability,” says Pinto. “We had two leaders who were so humble and made us feel comfortable enough to share our vulnerabilities. There is no end to how much we can know about critical consciousness.”

“My own critical consciousness has expanded over the past 12 years,” Windsor said, summing up the day and her collaborations with Pinto and Benoit. “I see greater possibilities but at the same time greater obstacles and challenges. People’s needs are so great and discrimination is so great. It was important to me and to all of us, I think, to have this day, to reconnect and think about why we are doing this work. We can all contribute to the knowledge and the solutions, and we can give each other hope.” n

“Newark is a special place,” Windsor says. “There are strong leaders turning the city around and an incredibly active, proud and close-knit community who have been fighting for their city for generations.”

Left to right: Liliane Windsor, Rogério M. Pinto, Ellen Benoit

Downtown Newark, NJ, in the distance, with the Passaic River to the left

PURSUING

Research

THROUGH

Social Justice the Arts

How the University of Michigan School of Social Work Is Leading the Way

BY ALLISON GOLDSTEIN

At first blush, art and research seem an unlikely, even contradictory, pairing. Art is subjective, expressive and expansive, while research is objective, analytical and confined. Yet when it comes to art and social work research, the two often have a common aim: surfacing, pursuing and achieving social justice.

Art, Social Work and Society

As long as art has existed, it has concerned itself with social justice. “Art holds up a mirror to society,” wrote Dudley Cocke, longtime director of Roadside Theater, in his introduction to the report Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change. “It is not a question of whether art and social justice are connected, but, rather, the forms and intensity of that connection.”

Social work research is, of course, also intimately intertwined with social justice. Says U-M School of Social Work Associate Dean for Research and Innovation Rogério M. Pinto, “There is no social work research that is not meant to advance some form of social justice, be it distributive, commutative, procedural and/or restorative justice. ”Social work artistic research gives us a way to look at society—sometimes through a telescope, sometimes through a microscope.”

Combining the two disciplines, therefore, is not such a stretch. Both are asking similar questions: Who is disadvantaged or marginalized? How? Why? What can be done about it? Then, both the artist and the social

work researcher (sometimes the same person) must collect data and analyze and present it to an audience, whether that audience is sitting in an auditorium or reading an academic journal. The artist and the social work researcher are both in the business of creating knowledge around social justice and possibilities for advancing it.

Cluster Hiring

Integrating art into research expands the scope and depth of what social work can achieve for social justice. Yet this work has only begun. “Social work is in the middle of an effort to integrate art practices into the research that we do,” says Pinto. “It’s innovative because it has never been done before.”

The U-M School of Social Work has committed to centering art within its social justice pursuits in a variety of ways. One way is through U-M’s anti-racism cluster hiring initiative. Pinto, along with colleagues in the School of Social Work and the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, are pursuing an open rank cluster hire for four professors, two at each school. They will be chosen based on

demonstrated track records of integrating literary, visual and/or performing arts into their research.

The purpose of these appointments is to develop the capacity to research and teach how the arts can be robust platforms for addressing racism and advancing social justice. “These four hires will situate U-M at the forefront of combining theory and practice to articulate how the arts reflect, shape and archive cultural ideologies and how, in turn, communities and individuals can advance social justice,” says Pinto.

Sarah Shields, a third-semester nontraditional MSW student who is part of the faculty search committee for these hires, sees the initiative as part of a broader social work movement that has significant potential for revolutionizing the care social workers can provide.

“What is interesting and innovative about this faculty search is that we are centering the arts, and artsbased healing, within social justice instead of focusing on an individual medical model of healing,” says Shields. “It gets away from the medical deficit lens—‘what is inherently wrong with you’—and has potential for trauma-informed care. I see this as a much broader way to approach social work, because art can reach someone in a way that other methods cannot.”

Integrating Art with Research

as interventions. That’s the case with the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), a program that provides arts programming to incarcerated youth and adults throughout the state of Michigan. Founded in 1990 with a single theater workshop, PCAP has grown to include courses, exhibits, publications, arts programming and events that reach thousands of people each year. The project is run by the U-M College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; members from the School of Social Work also participate.

One PCAP participant is Vitalis Im, a PhD Candidate in Social Work and Anthropology. He considers PCAP the literal embodiment of arts-based social justice action. “Prison is ‘it’ when it comes to disenfranchised populations,” says Im. He shares that, while most prisoners will eventually be released back into society, prison is not designed for rehabilitation; it is typically punitive, joyless and isolating. PCAP uses the arts to counteract that. “There isn’t much in prisons that brings joy or fun or human connection,” Im says. “The arts are a unique way of allowing that to happen.”

Indian Heart, 1994; Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, American, b. St. Ignatius, MT, 1940; lithograph (U-M School of Social Work Social Justice Art Collection)

While the two new hires will help to formalize and promote the School of Social Work’s intent to integrate art and social work research, this type of work is already happening at the school. Below are just a few examples.

Entertain Me Well - Prof. Joseph Himle is collaborating with Geoff Packard, an assistant professor at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance. Packard uses his screenwriting skills to help Himle’s team develop entertaining, computer-assisted, story-driven approaches to delivering mental health treatment to underserved individuals, via an intervention platform called Entertain Me Well (For more on a specific use of Entertain Me Well, see page 22.)

Social Work Collaborates with Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) - Some forms of art-based research start

As a social work researcher, Im is keen on interrogating methods that have the potential to help incarcerated people. “What do the arts do for people on the inside? How do they help forge relationships?” asks Im. “And are the arts always a good thing? There are fantastical ideas of how much good arts can do; are there instances where they are not benevolent?” These are the types of questions Im wants to pursue to ensure that arts-based interventions like PCAP fulfill their altruistic ambitions.

Photovoice - Other forms of arts-based research work simultaneously as a research tool and as an intervention. Mieko Yoshihama, Professor of Social Work, uses two such forms in her research. One is a method called Photovoice.

Photovoice was developed in 1992 by Caroline Wang, then a faculty member at the U-M School of Public Health. It is a participatory action research method that involves asking community participants to take photographs that represent issues of importance to them, often around broad research themes. The participants then discuss the photographs as a group and decide how to share out findings from the project.

The Self-Healing & Social Justice Art Collective

The School of Social Work’s Self-Healing & Social Justice Art Collective comprises faculty, students and staff who are interested in the intersection of art and social work. The group meets biweekly to discuss issues of social justice, selfhealing and research strategies that involve the arts.

“I joined the Art Collective because it’s an opportunity to collaborate, network and center evidence-based practices within the arts, centered on social justice,” says Sarah Shields. “It’s a great opportunity to get to know other people who see the potential for the arts in social justice.”

Vitalis Im, another Art Collective member, echoes these sentiments:

“It’s nice to be in a space where we have a shared idea or mission statement about what the arts can do in social work.”

Shields has found that the group practices what it preaches: being welcoming, inclusive and accommodating. As a single mother of a toddler, her involvement depends on being able to bring her daughter to campus for meetings, which she said she has been encouraged to do.

The form and work of the Art Collective is by design open. The Collective works the way art works: it is nonlinear and cannot be forced into a set frame. It flows and grows on its own, organically, according to the input its members

provide. Prof. Rogerio M. Pinto has been the linchpin, due to his passion for bringing together arts and social work in service of social justice.

“Schools of social work across the country and abroad are waking up to a movement that started some time ago,” says Pinto. “Students are choosing schools that can offer innovative forms of learning, and the Art Collective is but one mechanism by which students can learn from different constituencies and can share the art they are producing.”

And this is how the U-M School of Social Work will continue to integrate the arts into its curriculum, ethos and research practices: guided by the unique, creative individuals who pursue it.

Prof. Mieko Yoshihama at the School of Social Work began using Photovoice in 1997, when she was conducting participatory action research with Asian immigrant women in Detroit. She needed to overcome a language barrier, and Photovoice, which relies on images, achieved that. She turned to the method again in 2011, during her work with marginalized women in Japan who had been affected by a series of natural and nuclear disasters.

“I think that our culture really relies on text language, verbal communication,” says Yoshihama.

“I think Photovoice really supplements or extends that text-based, language-based communication. It’s just amazing how much the photographs capture: insight, reflection and wisdom.”

Interactive Theater and Performance.

Interactive theater is another form of participatory action research, using performance to gather and disseminate information, particularly about sensitive topics such as suicide and intimate partner violence.

Mieko Yoshihama discovered the method 20 years ago when she was working to develop community-based domestic violence prevention programs in Asia. She’d worked with the community to conduct an

assessment, and when it came time to share the results back to the community, the community members requested, “No PowerPoint, no numbers.” They proposed creating a skit to translate and share the results in an accessible, engaging way.

In interactive theater, as used in social work, community members develop short plays to represent to the community the findings from an assessment—for example, about the prevalence and forms of domestic violence.

The play is then performed for the community. Attendees are invited to participate in the play by intervening as actors themselves within the scenario and/ or suggesting changes to the plot.

When the performance is over, there is a group discussion about what has been understood and a public sharing of thoughts and reactions.

According to Yoshihama, interactive theater opens community members’ eyes and imaginations to realities they may not have considered. “Theater is not innovative; it’s very indigenous. It’s been used for many centuries in certain communities as a way of organizing community. It’s the way people express their issues and feelings.” n

“We are centering the arts, and arts-based healing, within social justice.”

is the key to human liberation.”

GRACE LEE BOGGS

GRACE LEE BOGGS was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist.

b. 1915, Providence, RI, d. 2015, Detroit, MI. Kindred, (2002); Bill Barrett, American, b. 1934, Los Angeles, CA, University of Michigan, BS, Design (1958), MS, Design (1959), MFA (1960); bronze sculpture; (U-M School of Social Work Social Justice Art Collection)

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El Regresso del Caníbal Macrobiótico (The Return of the Macrobiotic Cannibal) (detail), 1998; Enrique Chagoya, American, b. Mexico City, Mexico, 1953; lithograph, woodcut, chine collé (U-M School of Social Work Social Justice Art Collection)