Teaching Diversity and Social Justice: Strategies for the Virtual MSW Classroom to Improve Educational Outcomes

Background: Virtual education holds unique challenges and opportunities for teaching students how to engage diversity and advance social justice per the CSWE EPAS.  Bringing together students from different geographic locations enhances exposure to, and learning from, a greater diversity of peers than might otherwise be possible in a campus-based program (Abels, 2005). At the same time, these students may live in more homogenous environments and cultural contexts.  Since they remain in place, they have less planned and impromptu interactions with peers and faculty than their on-campus counterparts, and, thus, less opportunity to unlearn prejudice and develop cultural competence.

Social distance and proximity play a significant role in fostering empathy and unlearning prejudice (e.g. Allport, 1954; Pettigrew et al, 2007). Social work educators are challenged to find new methods to promote this kind of understanding in the virtual classroom. Pedagogical approaches are in a state of flux as social work education adapts to online distance education (Reamer, 2013; Sawrikar, Lenette, McDonald, & Fowler, 2015).

Methods: Participants were recruited via email to participate in an IRB approved study. Participation constituted consent and participants’ identifying information was not collected.  Ninety minute focus groups were facilitated by the research team and conducted in Adobe classrooms with online instructors. Focus group notes were analyzed for themes related to challenges and teaching strategies for engaging diversity and advancing social justice.

Results: The preliminary themes identified in the focus groups are in two categories: Challenges and Strategies.

Challenges include: Isolation, given lack of opportunities for students to  interact informally with each other and instructor; Hot topic, diversity and social justice discussions are difficult, tense and triggering; Insufficient time, in synchronous sessions for in depth discussion; Lack of instructional resources, inadequate pedagogical tools; Participation, some students are reticent and others dominate discussion; Fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing, so students and faculty avoid discussion; Micro-aggressions, fear of addressing micro-aggressions in class; Positionality, impact of positionality, and awareness of one’s own positionality for instructor and student in regards to how their perspectives are influenced; Pre-existing student prejudices are major barriers to classroom discussion, application of the Code of Ethics, and ability to work with people that are different.

Strategies include: Engaging diversity, there is a great diversity of students and faculty online that provide learning opportunities; Taking chances, instructor willingness to push through their own fear to engage discussion; Safe spaces, instructors creating non-judgmental space for different points of view while creating a boundary against derogatory speech; Role plays & case examples; Grounding the discussion in empirical data, theory, code of ethics; Real-time fact-finding, ability of instructors to look up references and resources during class; Maximizing student focus by setting up the virtual classroom in ways to minimize distractions.

Conclusions: Online education presents challenges and opportunities for teaching diversity and social justice. Our findings confirm the nascent existing literature on these topics and they provide strategies for instructors teaching in online MSW programs.