2020 APM

2020 Annual Program Meeting––Leading Critical Conversations: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

The Council on Social Work Education's 2020 Annual Program Meeting (APM) focused on "Leading Critical Conversations: Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion" and featured hundreds of social work education presentations, daily keynote sessions, a virtual exhibit hall, and networking opportunities. It took place November 16–20, 2020, and was entirely virtual due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Download the 2020 APM Final Program

 

2020 APM Speakers

Hokenstad International Lecture: Dr. Cindy Blackstock
Executive Director, First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada
Colonialism in 2020: Seeking Equity for Nations Within Nations
We live in a world where First Nations continue to be the victims of violence inflicted on them by the nations in which they are geographically located. This is the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. This lecture will discuss this situation and also offer some examples of how social workers can successfully advocate for the human rights of First Nations peoples. It will connect work being carried out around the world in the defense of the human rights of First Nations and discuss the role of social workers in making positive social change to advance human rights and social justice, including using cultural equity as a basis for reconciliation.

The Hokenstad Lecture is generously supported by the CSWE Commission on Global Social Work Education.


Plenary Lecture: Ibram X. Kendi
Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Boston University
How To Be an Antiracist: A Conversation With Ibram X. Kendi
A conversation on the importance of civic engagement in fighting for racial justice, how to promote policies that support equity, and why hope is central to the antiracist movement. It will be moderated by CSWE President and CEO Darla Spence Coffey and CSWE Board Chair Saundra Starks. 


Carl A. Scott Memorial Lecture: Dr. Dexter R. Voisin
Dean and Professor, University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work
America the Beautiful and Violent: The Role of Social Work in Addressing Anti-Black Racism
America is one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world. Its cultural artifacts penetrate and inhabit the imaginations and lives of people worldwide in the form of Hollywood films, pop music, social media, and sports. Many of these contributions have been made by African Americans. But racism is America’s birth defect, and America has continued to struggle and falter with her sparring realities and separate and unequal existences based on race. A racial caste system has been modernized but never really dismantled, with millions of African American families growing up in the shadow of the stars and stripes. The social work profession has also struggled with its dueling legacies of social control and social change. This lecture will highlight what it means for social work to more fully adopt an anti-Black racism framework, especially within the context of COVID-19 health disparities and the growing global conversations concerning racial reckoning.


Special Lecture: Laura Burney Nissen
Presidential Futures Fellow and Professor, Portland State University
Social Work Education and Practice in Postnormal Times: Using Futures Thinking to Move the Field and the World Forward
What does it look like to be "ready" for what happens next? Postnormal times refers to a time when some of our old ways are falling away (not without a fight), new ones are being born, and everything feels out of balance. And many suggest—we are there. As we navigate uncertainty, volatility, and transition in the world around us in the months and years to come - what is social work's role in building the new world we aspire to? Futures thinking and its affiliated practice, foresight, is a way of moving through uncertainty and unpredictable futures in ways that cultivate collective imagination, intelligence, and agility. Issues of racism and equity, climate change, rapidly proliferating technologies, predatory economics, misinformation campaigns, and a sea of both challenges and opportunities to build human health are but a few of the markers in the landscape of social work in the future. Our profession has an enormous potential role to play in participating in the healing and reimagining a better and more equitable world. But this can only happen if we evolve to meet the challenges ahead of us, as are other professions such as medicine, law and journalism. This session will challenge social workers and educators to find our "growing edges" in the learning and development work we need to do to be ready for the opportunities in the coming years.


Film Screening and Q&A with Director Shalini Kantayya
Shalini Kantayya, Director, CODED BIAS
CODED BIAS follows MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini’s startling discovery that many facial recognition technologies fail more often on darker-skinned faces and the faces of women, and delves into an investigation of widespread bias in artificial intelligence. APM is hosting two events for CODED BIAS.
 

2020 Professional Recognition Awards 


Significant Lifetime Achievement in Social Work Education Award: Betty J. Ruth, Associate Clinical Professor | Boston University
Ruth is clinical professor and director of the MSW/MPH program at Boston University (BU) School of Social Work, where she taught ethics, racial justice, and macro practice and has served as the director of the MSW/MPH program for more than 30 years. Trained as a public health social worker, Ruth has been a passionate lifelong advocate for the integration of public health approaches in social work. Over three decades, she stewarded the tiny BU program (from which she had graduated in 1984/1985), into the largest program of its kind in the United States. Today, due to its carefully crafted curriculum and integrated focus on public health social work (PHSW), it is widely regarded as a standard-bearer for MSW/MPH education. Throughout her career, Ruth has provided broad leadership to advance the integration of public health skills into social work. She has written extensively on the history of PHSW, MSW/MPH education, and the profession’s role in prevention. She has consulted with other MSW/MPH programs, held leadership roles in the American Public Health Association’s PHSW Section, and co-established the Group for PHSW Initiatives to support efforts to elevate the ongoing importance of integrating PHSW. As principal investigator for Advancing Leadership in Public Health Social Work Education, a Health Resources Services Administration project based at BU, Ruth led her team in producing many free resources for those interested in integrating public health concepts into their work. Ruth has often noted that the entire profession stands on the shoulders of PHSW ancestors and that her goal has been to help “package and transmit the heirloom seeds of public health social work” for broad use when its necessity was more clearly appreciated. She has recently revised her view that PHSW’s time is later. She notes that COVID-19 makes the urgent need for PHSW explicit. She looks forward to joining with social workers in the field as we rebuild from COVID-19.

Distinguished Recent Contributions to Social Work Education Award: Dr. Rebecca Gomez Associate Dean of Academic and Student Affairs at Our Lady of the Lake University
Dr. Gomez is PhD director at Our Lady of the Lake University (OLLU). She was previously MSW director and director of the Worden School at OLLU. Dr. Gomez is renowned for her use of technology as a way to increase access to quality social work education, coupled with a radical emphasis on building culture and community in distance education environments. As director of the Worden School Dr. Gomez led a program in which students represented extreme geographic diversity including all 50 states and internationally. She pioneered the incorporation of tenure-track remote faculty members at OLLU to increase the diversity of faculty training, research, and experience. She also spearheaded research on this innovation to enhance the viability and effectiveness of remote faculty members. These innovative programs not only increased access and enrollment, they also supported underrepresented students, which resulted in high retention and graduation rates. Dr. Gomez also pioneered and led the OLLU online PhD program, one of only three online PhD programs in the United States, which provided access to underrepresented students and filled an important gap in social work education by training faculty members especially for service in minority serving institutions. The use of targeted design, recruitment, and holistic admissions that reflected collectivist cultures resulted in an unprecedented representation of diversity in the inaugural cohort, which reflects a 36% increase in racial and ethnic diversity compared to other U.S. social work PhD programs. Dr. Gomez was named a Top 30 Technologist, Transformer, and Trailblazer in 2017 by the Center for Digital Education; the Agnes M. (Lehman) Gloyna Award for Technological Innovation in Teaching and Learning at Our Lady of the Lake University; and The Texas Distance Learning Association Award for Outstanding Commitment to Excellence and Innovation in Distance Learning by an Organization. Dr. Gomez will join the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work in August 2020 as associate dean of academic and student affairs.

Early Career Faculty Service and Leadership in Social Work Education Award: Dr. Alice Gates Associate Professor and BSW Program Director at University of Portland
Dr. Gates earned her MSW (2007) and PhD (social work and sociology, 2011) from the University of Michigan. She is associate professor of social work, BSW program director, and department chair of sociology/social work at the University of Portland. Dr. Gates’ contributions to the field are motivated by a deep commitment to social justice and more than a decade of community organizing focused on building power among women, low-wage workers, and recent immigrant communities. Her research examines how formally disfranchised groups engage in collective action and explores how the experiences of vulnerable and marginalized populations should inform community practice and social policy. Examples of her community-based research have appeared in the Journal of Community Practice and Families in Society. Since 2015 she has been involved with the Association for Community Organization and Social Administration and served as an ally to the Special Commission to Advance Macro Practice. For 3 years she served at the University of Portland as the director of the Social Justice Program, and she has served on the boards of local and statewide organizations serving Latinx communities and advocating for women’s economic security.

The Established Faculty Service and Leadership in Social Work Education Award: Dr. Kay Hoffman Retired Professor at University of Kentucky
Dr. Hoffman is professor and dean emerita of the College of Social Work, University of Kentucky (UK), where she served for 20 years. Retired in 2018, Dr. Hoffman continues her work with PhD students and supervises an evaluation team of researchers examining prevention responses in child welfare and public health. At UK she was the Dorothy A. Miller Professor in Social Work Education and a member of the Kentucky Institute of Medicine. Her scholarly work is in social work education, child welfare, and international social work. Dr. Hoffman was president of the Council on Social Work Education and chair of the Commission on Accreditation, served on the board of the International Association of Schools of Social Work, and has been a visiting faculty member at the University of West Arad in Romania and a senior scholar at CSWE. She won the Significant Achievement Award from the College of Arts and Sciences, Ohio University; the Friend of School Social Work Award from the Kentucky School Social Work Association in 2007; and was NASW Social Worker of the Year at the New River Valley Chapter in Virginia. She is past president of the Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency and the Detroit Welfare Reform Coalition. Dr. Hoffman continues to be active in her local community, having served as the president of the Plantory, an incubator for nonprofit organizations, and president of the Center on Human Entrepreneurship Solutions Group. Presently, she is a board member of the Peninsula Art Academy. She is a graduate of Ohio University, the Ohio State University, and Wayne State University in Detroit. She was a faculty member and academic administrator at Marygrove College, Wayne State University, New Mexico State University, and Radford University in Virginia prior to her tenure and retirement from UK.
 

JSWE Award Winners for Volume 55

Best Reviewers: Leon Ginsberg (Appalachian State University, retired) and David Moxley (University of Alaska, Anchorage)

Best Empirical Article: Werman, A., Adlparvar, F., Horowitz, J. K., & Hasegawa, M. O. (2019). Difficult conversations in a school of social work: Exploring student and faculty perceptions. Journal of Social Work Education, 55, 251–264.

Best Conceptual Article: Mersky, J. P., Topitzes, J., & Britz, L. (2019). Promoting evidence-based, trauma-informed social work practice. Journal of Social Work Education, 55, 645–657.

Best Note: Kuilema, J., Schwander, L., Alford, K., Venema, R., & Hoeksema, S. (2019). Teaching Note—Time for a Teach-In? Addressing Racist Incidents on College Campuses. Journal of Social Work Education, 55, 818–824. 
 

2020 APM Tracks

 

  • Addictions
  • African Americans and the African Diaspora
  • Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders
  • Baccalaureate Programs
  • Child Welfare
  • Clinical Practice
  • Community Organization and Social Administration
  • Criminal and Juvenile Justice
  • Cultural Competence
  • Disability Issues
  • Disaster and Traumatic Stress
  • Educational Outcomes Assessment
  • Evidence-Based Practice
  • Feminist Scholarship
  • Field Education
  • First Nations and Native Americans
  • Gero-Ed (Aging and Gerontology)
  • Group Work
  • Health
  • Higher Education/Nonprofit Leadership
  • Human Behavior and the Social Environment
  • Immigrants, Refugees, and Displaced Populations
  • International Issues
  • Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice
  • Islam and Muslims
  • Latina/Latino Issues
  • LGBTQIA+ and Two-Spirit
  • Military Personnel and Veterans, First Responders, and Their Families and Communities
  • Research and Program Evaluation
  • Rural Issues
  • Social Welfare History
  • Social Welfare Policy and Policy Practice
  • Social, Economic, and Environmental Justice
  • Spanish-Language Paper Presentation
  • Spirituality
  • Teaching Methods and Learning Styles
  • Technology in Social Work Education and Practice
  • University–Community Partnerships
  • Values and Ethics
  • Violence Against Women and Their Children