Social work education has the potential to be transformative, consciousness raising, and to produce social change while inspiring hope in students for the creation of more just systems. An understanding of oppression, its diverse manifestations, and its differential impact on vulnerable individuals and groups is essential to contemporary social work education. What then is the best manner in which to prepare educators for the immensely important, complex, and multidimensional role as teacher of social work? Most social work instructors learn to teach through trial and error, bringing their own style, experiences, and preferences to the endeavour rather than having a formal program of education and instruction on how to best educate and instruct. This book addresses the complex and uncertain field of social work education, gathering together thirty experienced professors and practitioners who teach in BSW, MSW, and PhD programs. Together, the contributors create a framework for social work educators to reflect on how they teach, why they teach in specific ways, and what works best for teaching in the discipline of social work.

Research skills are as critical to social work practitioners as skills in individual and group counselling, policy analysis, and community development. Adopting strategies similar to those used in direct practice courses, this book integrates research with social work practice, and in so doing promotes an understanding and appreciation of the research process. This second edition of Practising Social Work Research comprises twenty-three case studies that illustrate different research approaches, including quantitative, qualitative, single-subject, and mixed methods. Six are new to this edition, and examine research with First Nations, organizing qualitative data, and statistics. Through these real-life examples, the authors demonstrate the processes of conceptualization, operationalization, sampling, data collection and processing, and implementation. Designed to help the student and practitioner become more comfortable with research procedures, Practising Social Work Research capitalizes on the strengths that social work students bring to assessment and problem solving.