Social work self-care education informed during the pandemic: Experience,reflection,and suggestion

Abstract

During the coronavirus pandemic, self-care practice was more than ever underscored for social work students as they have encountered increasing stress in their personal life, schoolwork, and professional practice. These stressors have been interweaved with social problems, further increasing the pressure on them. For social work educators, this situation highlights the necessity of developing students’ self-care competency. This brief note reflects upon the challenges we face in integrating self-care components in social policy courses since the outbreak of the pandemic and suggests that social work self-care education can be broadened in terms of purpose, scope, and content in the future.

Keywords

Coronavirus empowerment self-care competency social work education stress coping

Self-care has been evidenced to prevent and manage professional burnout, compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, and other stress-related effects of providing professional help (Collins, 2021). As the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW, 2018) states, social workers have a ‘duty to take necessary steps to care for themselves professionally and personally in the workplace and society’. To develop self-care competencies among future social workers, social work educators have been making unremitting efforts. For example, some self-care methods, such as mindfulness and self-reflective journal writing, have increasingly become part of the course contents in many social work programs (Gockel and Deng, 2016; Moore et al., 2011). Also, self-care is perceived as relevant to both the micro and macro levels of social work practice courses and suggested to be integrated into the social work curriculum in a systematic way (Newell and Nelson-Gardell, 2014).

During the coronavirus pandemic, studies have documented some new challenges for social work self-care education. Like college and graduate students in other majors, social work students strived to maintain academic performance, deal with the changes in their lives and families, and hold lingering concerns over health and future uncertainties (Wang et al., 2020). Moreover, the co-occurrence of the pandemic and social unrest (e.g. Black Lives Matter in the United States) has caused additional emotional and psychological distress among the general population (Peinado and Anderson, 2020). Nevertheless, social work students who face dual stressors also need to learn advocacy for social justice. For social work educators, this situation highlights the necessity of developing students’ self-care skills not only at personal but also at professional and social levels. In this brief note, we recount the main challenges we encountered in integrating self-care components in social policy courses since the outbreak of the pandemic and provide recommendations for social work self-care education in the future.

First challenge: Help-seeking ice-breaking

During the pandemic, students were surrounded by an array of proximal demands and stressors in their personal life, schoolwork, and field practice more than ever. We observed an issue that had been in existence but became more significant since the pandemic: the meaning of self-care seemed self-evident to students but sounded distant and was regarded as secondary. Many students often tended to compress needs, feign well-being, self-blame for performance less than expectations, and set challenging goals for themselves to reach. Some students confided that they felt ashamed to ask for help from others, even from instructors, for an extension. A couple of students often held their difficulties until the end of the semester, though we repeatedly mentioned no hesitation in reaching out.

The challenge showed us a common barrier in self-care practice that was often neglected in our social work self-care education: the help-seeking dilemma. Previous studies indicated that our self-image as professional helpers is often imposed by the idealistic perceptions of clients. Such self-image can affect self-esteem and cause disappointment when failure or challenge happens (Siebert and Siebert, 2007). Therefore, in social work self-care education, it is crucial to create a class environment that embraces our vulnerabilities as social work professionals, develops self-compassion, and addresses barriers to seeking help. Specifically, one of us directly explained to students that asking for help could be not easy since it might challenge our high self-esteem. As students heard the point, they smiled with relief and further discussed the pressure to overcome it in a collective manner.

Second challenge: Exploring self-care methods

In the context of the pandemic, some widely promoted self-care methods showed their limited application in some circumstances. For example, having a quiet place for meditation or doing outdoor exercise now seems impractical or even impossible during a quarantine. Attending the virtual classroom reduced class interaction which was essential to convey peer support. Also, it was sometimes a trade-off between taking time for self-care talks and completing course contents. Our solution was to regularly devote about 10 minutes each class to a casual check-in. For instance, when their dogs and cats appeared in the virtual meeting by accident, when they ate their morning cereal in front of the screen as they were ‘sitting’ in class, when the sunshine blurred the camera, such moments naturally led us to talk about loving pets, favorite foods, and different kinds of things that could cheer us up in daily life.

But still, there was a gap that some self-care techniques centering around emotion-focused self-care could not bridge to meet the needs of students and reduce stressors. The students in one of our classes explained how they were overwhelmed by the news about the pandemic. After a piece of news triggered their anxiety, anger, and sadness, they were driven to look for more details and other related reports until they felt emotionally overwhelmed and stopped with a sense of guilt for not working instead on assignments. Responding to such a struggle, we discussed self-care tips, such as developing healthy phone habits, adjusting attitudes toward news, and reducing distractions. Nevertheless, many stress-coping strategies that students looked for were far less explored. There were students who did not feel comfortable disclosing their experiences in class. Facing their deep personal struggles in one-on-one meetings, we found that teaching self-care techniques should not stand alone without the support from professional counselors.

Third challenge: Self-care through empowerment

As personal stress was intertwined with social problems and political uncertainties during the pandemic, students in our classes were deeply troubled by social injustice, racism, and political polarization. To integrate the self-care component into the policy practice we taught, empowerment was identified as the bridge since taking action has been called ‘radical self-care’ to respond to social problems (Powers and Engstrom, 2020). Accordingly, we guided our students to develop a belief that rather than suppressing their strong feelings (e.g. sadness, disappointment, and anger) toward social issues, they could turn those emotions into the motivation to learn social policies and engage in social changes.

In this sense, we fostered a learning environment in which students were comfortable sharing their feelings and opinions on social issues, social policies, and politics without the concern of being different from and judged by others. On this basis, students were further encouraged by class activities that simulated public advocacy (e.g. elevator speech, mock legislative hearings). Particularly, students expressed their gratitude for the mock legislative hearings because such activities allow them to speak out about what they want in the roles assumed but are a challenge to engage in in reality. However, transforming the class activities into real-world actions calls for more structural support. We found the contrast that students who acted alone found it stressful to speak to people in authority and hold different political stances, while students who had been involved in advocacy groups showed more boldness in action. Identity-based groups and action groups aimed at a specific change are highly expected but often unavailable.

Recommendations for social work self-care education

Based on our experiences and reflections above, we offer the following recommendations for future self-care education for the international social work community.

First, social work self-care education needs to tackle the obstacles to practicing self-care. It should not be assumed that the straightforward meaning and obvious value of self-care naturally leads to practice. Further studies can apply behavioral health theories, such as social cognitive theory, planned behavior theory, and the health belief model, to understand the personal and contextual factors that contribute to the untended self-care needs, especially those related to the help-seeking dilemma that many social workers face.

Second, social work self-care education is expected to combine emotional, cognitive, and behavioral coping methods, so that students can identify the source of stress, understand the influence of negative thoughts, and take on actions for change. For graduate-level social work students, educators may guide them to apply the evidence-based counseling approaches (e.g. Cognitive-behavioral Therapy and Problem-solving Therapy) to themselves in coping with stress. In the meantime, social work educators can look for some reliable and valid self-care inventories that indicate the main domains of the self-care concept and an array of different self-care methods (as reviewed by Jiang et al., 2021). In this way, self-care education could be flexible in developing either in a causal short class session or in a structural manner throughout a semester.

Third, social work self-care education needs to bridge the gap between classroom-based support and agency- and identity-based support in the practice setting. Social work students, in most cases, will no longer have access to self-care support from professors and other university-based resources after graduation. Once entering the workplace, they may not immediately be able to identify the available support resources at their agencies, professional associations, or advocacy groups. Therefore, self-care education should not only be integrated into the social work curriculum (Newell and Nelson-Gardell, 2014) but also into students’ extracurricular activities and field placements. For example, social work educators can guide students to connect with advocacy groups outside the social work program, empowering them to get involved in a much broader scope of collective efforts for social justice.

Conclusion

By integrating self-care contents into social policy courses during the pandemic, we found that social work self-care education could be broadened in terms of purpose, scope, and content. From the perspective of career development, social work self-care education aims to prepare students to transit from schools to workplaces by breaking the paradox of social workers’ help-seeking and identifying professional care support resources. The scope of social work self-care needs to be expanded from the individual level to the professional and social levels, including the promotion of empowerment through collective efforts. Moreover, the delivery of self-care education is expected to be enriched by introducing emotional-, cognitive-, and behavioral-based stress-coping strategies, so that students can acquire diverse self-care knowledge and skills for their personal and professional well-being.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Xiaoran Wang

Author biographies

Xiaoran Wang earned her PhD in social work at Fordham University, New York. Her research interests include child development, parenting support, disabilities policies, and social work education.

Yiwei Zhang earned her PhD in social work at Fordham University, New York. Her research interests include child well-being, immigrant families, social welfare policy, and international social work education.

References

Collins

(2021) Social workers and self-care: A promoted yet unexamined concept? Practice 33(2): 87–102.

Gockel

Deng

(2016) Mindfulness training as social work pedagogy: Exploring benefits, challenges, and issues for consideration in integrating mindfulness into social work education. Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought 35(3): 222–244.

International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) (2018) Global social work statement of ethical principles. Available at: https://www.ifsw.org/global-social-work-statement-of-ethical-principles/ (accessed 15 April 2022).

Jiang

Topps

Suzuki

(2021) A systematic review of self-care measures for professionals and trainees. Training and Education in Professional Psychology 15(2): 126–139.

Moore

Bledsoe

Perry

, et al. (2011) Social work students and self-care: A model assignment for teaching. Journal of Social Work Education 47(3): 545–553.

Newell

Nelson-Gardell

(2014) A competency-based approach to teaching professional self-care: An ethical consideration for social work educators. Journal of Social Work Education 50(3): 427–439.

Peinado

Anderson

(2020) Reducing social worker burnout during COVID-19. International Social Work 63(6): 757–760.

Powers

Engstrom

(2020) Radical self-care for social workers in the global climate crisis. Social Work 65(1): 29–37.

Siebert

(2007) Help seeking among helping professionals: A role identity perspective. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 77(1): 49–55.

10.

Wang

Hegde

Son

, et al. (2020) Investigating mental health of US college students during the COVID-19 pandemic: Cross-sectional survey study. Journal of Medical Internet Research 22(9): e22817.