Sustaining Social Justice Work: Teaching Whole Person Resilience in Social Work Education

I am currently the PI of the project “Sustaining Social Justice Work: Teaching Whole Person Resilience in Social Work Education.” The purpose of this study is to increase understanding of occupational stressors, coping mechanisms, and resilience skills in current and former social work students in order to inform a resilience and capacity-building approach to social work education that forefronts a social justice analysis. Social workers report higher levels of work-related stress and burnout than many other occupations, particularly when events from the social worker’s own history are triggered and re-experienced in the course of the work. The combination of secondary traumatic stress and compassion fatigue has been shown to contribute to stress, burnout, and early career dropout. While the phenomenon of burnout has been well researched, how to build resilience and capacity to manage occupational stress has received little research attention. In spite of what is known about the stresses and challenges of the social work profession, traditional social work education places minimal emphasis on teaching effective strategies for managing stress and building the resilience needed for sustaining the practice of social work over the lifetime of a career. Furthermore, research and educational strategies in this area do not typically address how these phenomena affect practitioners differently based on their social identities and trauma histories. This study, therefore, seeks to inform the development of a resilience-building approach to social work education that centers a social justice analysis through a mixed-method approach.