Advancing a Human Rights Practice Approach in Field Education Settings with Justice-Involved Populations
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Advancing a Human Rights Practice Approach in Field Education Settings with Justice-Involved Populations Michelle M. Vance 1
&
Maruka Rivers 1
Accepted: 25 October 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract In the USA, persons of color as well as those from economically marginalized communities are over-represented in prisons and jails. This over-representation suggests the violation of justice-involved individuals’ rights to equality under the law. Field placement settings with justice-involved populations present opportunities for students to employ human rights-based practice approaches. This article will present teaching strategies currently used in the Joint Master of Social Work Re-entry Field Education Unit to provide social work students with a greater understanding of human rights issues so they can effectively intervene with individuals and advance a human rights practice approach. These strategies aim to enhance the cognitive, affective, skills, and values domains of student learning as outlined by the Council on Social Work Education. These strategies include a reentry simulation to foster student affective awareness (i.e., empathy) and a human rights intervention planning tool to promote a “rights-based orientation” via a shift to clinician-advocate mindset. Keywords Human rights . Human rights practice . Field education . Justice-involved populations
Introduction The current 2015 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards of the U.S. Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) states the purpose of social work is “actualized through… the prevention of conditions that limit human rights” (CSWE 2015, p. 5). While CSWE creates a mandate for teaching human rights, there is little guidance on how to do so. Furthermore, human rights are not commonly recognized in the guiding documents for the social work profession in the USA (Mapp et al. 2019). With field education as a signature pedagogy of social work education as asserted by CSWE (EPAS 2008), it is concerning that students enter field placements and find an absence of practices aligned with human rights values (Werkmeister Rozas and Garran 2016). This article addresses a gap in social work education in applied human rights practice, specifically by presenting a model social work field experience embedded in a community/university partnership * Michelle M. Vance [email protected] 1
Department of Social Work and Sociology, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, 1601 E Market Street, Greensboro, NC 27411, USA
with justice-involved (i.e., formerly and currently incarcerated) individuals. In this model social work placement, strategies are implemented to increase student empathy and teach rights-based practices. This model is transferable across populations served by social workers in micro-focused field education settings. Mental health disparities, racism, and poverty contribute to mass incarceration, maintain the cyclical involvement with the criminal justice system, and are direct barriers to the full experience of un
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