Recentering Community Knowledge through Practice Informed Research: Empowering Scholar-Practitioner Experience within the Academy

This roundtable seeks to bring the social work scholarship back to its roots in community engagement, practice, and knowledge. Scholars actively engaged in social work practice have offered unique access and perspective to community experience and knowledge since the birth of social work research. However, with the rise of highly-funded, product and publication-driven research within R1 institutions, scholar-practitioner, those concurrently engaging scholarship and direct practice roles have become more and more limited in leading schools of social work, particularly those highly ranked. As three scholar-practitioners from top-five, R1 social work institutions, we assert that by integrating direct practice experience with social work research, our institutions can reinvigorate and strengthen their foundations of practice-informed scholarship and scholarship-informed practice in social work. A value shift away from communities, and consequential institutional barriers like funding, mentorship, and representation have fueled a continued pervasive disconnect between practice and research over the last few decades. According to CSWEs 2020 Annual Survey of Social Work Programs (counting both full-time and part-time faculty), 60-65% are white with only 30-35% being faculty of color. Racial disparities among faculty persist despite increasing racial and ethnic diversity of MSW students. Across social work institutions, clinical courses are most commonly taught by adjunct faculty, who are predominantly practitioners of color. Racial and ethnic disparities dictate dynamics of power and inequity. Though adjunct faculty of color carry the majority of teaching obligations and the bulk of clinical expertise, they tend to have the least access to institutional power. Additionally, while 90% of all faculty hold MSW degrees, approximately only 51% of full-time and part-time faculty are licensed to practice. This is especially poignant considering that advanced generalist practice and mental health are among the top three specializations offered in MSW programs. We hope to explore how these inequities contribute to the oppressive and narrow ways our field defines, recognizes, compensates, and utilizes clinical knowledge in training social work researchers. A disconnect remains between the academy's desire for practice-informed research, and the lack of prioritization in training clinical faculty to perform such research. We have noticed that this dichotomy is silencing scholar-practitioners, narrowing the scope of research they contribute to the field. We will invite a lively, informative discussion involving the following critical questions: 1) How can scholar-practitioners engage their translational skills and community-based scholarship to be empowered within institutional practice-informed research? 2) How are scholar-practitioners experiencing the social work academy, moderated by social factors like race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, disability, and other intersecting identities? 3) How might social work shift scholarship to center relationships between communities and scholar-practitioners more intentionally? 4) How can social work institutions systemically redistribute power among non-practicing researchers and scholar-practitioners to ensure the democratization of knowledge across research labs, communities, and classrooms?