This narrative documents the beginning early stages of a collective called #SWEDUACTS. We are four White, female social work educators who over the last year have led the planning of a teach-in event held in October of 2020 and subsequent monthly drop-in, peer-led Professional Learning Community meetings drawing dozens of participants over the past nine months. We reflect here on how engaging in the planning and delivery of the drop-in sessions helps ground our commitment to anti-racist pedagogy as well as facilitates the capacity of other social work instructors to build their own capabilities as anti-racist social work pedagogues.

The lack of diversity within the academic social work environment has enormous ramifications for the profession as this affects students, the curriculum, academic policies, research inquiry, and knowledge building for the field. The question is—how can this be addressed? One way to do this is for PhD directors/program chairs to recruit and form cohesive cohorts that represent diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. This reflection includes a retrospective of the behind-the-scenes work and the lessons learned regarding the important process of recruiting a diverse group of students. This reflection speaks to the important issue of cohort cohesion: how this helps to support all students and their academic success. Finally, this narrative focuses on three social work PhD students from the University of South Florida as they started their precarious journey into academia in a year many would like to forget ever existed.

The aim of this paper is to relay the reflections of my experience as a Latinx school social worker and about my work with children and families identifying as rural and migrant. A de-identified real-life mental health crisis case scenario is provided. The case scenario contains the voices of a child and a parent living in a rural migrant camp. The content of the voices was paraphrased from the school social workers’ post-crisis contact with a high school student and her mother. Professional first-person content is the voice of the social worker. The case vignette is followed by a combination of the social worker’s observations and information drawn from the professional literature about challenges and opportunities for rural schools to provide culturally sensitive practices for migrant children and families. Specific practice recommendations are offered for working with rural, migrant youth, particularly pertaining to child mental health per the case scenario.

Homicide is a word that unquestionably invokes visceral responses. For families who have endured this traumatic experience, the manner of death augmented by social determinants complicates grieving processes. This narrative uses Worden’s Four Tasks of Mourning to chronicle the author’s journey of complicated bereavement following the loss of a sibling.

This reflection explores my (Collins') experience residing with a military member diagnosed with military-related post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite being a social worker, I was unsure what was happening to my partner and myself following the diagnosis. With little supports and understanding from others about what I was facing, I felt completely defeated and hopeless as my own mental health plummeted to the point that I was also diagnosed with secondary PTSD. This paper reflects upon this journey while also sharing insight to help others in similar situations, researchers, and practitioners so that they are better equipped to address the concerns. The connection between healing the body, mind, and spirit was instrumental in my healing. It is hoped that through some of the strategies, and by demonstrating that healing is possible, hope will be instilled in others while also educating helping professionals on the impact of PTSD.

Younger persons living in long term care often come to care due to a lack of support, including social support from family and friends, which is a result of frail, fragmented and fractured relationships. My dissertation explored the experiences of socially isolated younger residents—defined as persons under the age of 65—who lived in long term care, where policies and procedures focus primarily on caring for older persons. My connections to these residents was abruptly cut off during the early lockdowns, associated with COVID-19. When the nursing homes reopened, I began to visit again. The qualitative data from these visits were the foundation for a poetic inquiry. This poem is one of the results.

The South African education system has been aptly described as a “two-school” education system. This description refers to one of the many legacies of apartheid, which resulted in one well-resourced school system that offers high quality education to one sector of the population, with the other under-resourced and generally struggling to achieve the same results. As part of my teacher training, I have worked in both systems. Straddling this dichotomous education system during the COVID-19 pandemic has given me valuable insights and has significantly contributed to how I envisage my career as a teacher. Through this narrative reflection I provide an account of key moments during my teaching practice module that contributed to my altered worldview. Entering the teaching profession during the COVID-19 pandemic proved very challenging, but ironically, it was this disruptive entry that has changed my worldview so that I now feel drawn to working in under-resourced schools.

This essay joins personal narrative with an unpublished book review expressing my skepticism about current anti-racism rhetoric within social work programs and the performative actions that often accompany it. Here, I revisit a critique of the personal narrative written by anti-racism educator Tim Wise in White Like Me (2011) completed during course work in a doctoral program. I use my reaction to Wise’s reflection on his white privilege as material to explore and examine efforts to confront and dismantle systemic racism in social work programs and essentially throughout the profession. I challenge social work programs to think critically about the next steps towards their positions on anti-racism and their interactions with students, staff, and faculty. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the essay while offering opportunities for scholars to contribute to the conversation about dismantling, deconstructing, and divesting from racist ideology and policies in social work programs.

This critically reflexive, conversation-based paper traces the lived intersectional experiences of systemic racism of two racialized women educators (Black and Brown-South Asian settler) at a Canadian university located on the traditional territories of the Anishnawbe, Haudenosaunee, and Neutral peoples. We discuss experiences of navigating whiteness in relation to “model minority” status and the discourses of diversity that permeate academe. We reflect on how racism, and specifically anti-Black racism and whiteness, are embedded in research. Some key questions we wrestled with are: How are the conversations about model minority status really about white supremacy and proximity to whiteness? How are Brown bodies played against Indigeneity and Blackness to further disenfranchise the latter and serve capitalist interests? How have academic institutions co-opted Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) policies to benefit the status quo? The spirit of the paper encapsulates the two authors’ building solidarity by resisting racist hierarchies enshrined within academia.

As a Native American social work student and practicum supervisor, we describe a program evaluation at a campus Native American student services site and share insights on integrating Indigenous ways of knowing, cultural practices, and a justice orientation into identities and practices. We describe disseminating findings and student efforts to work within systems to make policy changes; however, changing a system—that constantly tells you that you (and who you are) are not meant to be there—while you are in the system is not easy. We describe key engagement concepts including microaggressions, stereotype threat, tokenism, resiliency, and survivance. We—as decolonizing social work scholars—provide a vision for how to move forward together in creating culturally safe classrooms, campuses, communities, and social work practices grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing and being.