Session: Ecological Approaches to School-Focused Social Work Research and Practice: Exploring the Intersection between School, Family, and Community Contexts (Society for Social Work and Research 30th Annual Conference Anniversary)

Social work research and practice are anchored in strengths-based perspectives and ecological approaches that recognize the dynamic relationship between people and their environments. In this symposium, we draw on these perspectives to situate school-focused social work research and interventions at multiple ecological levels. Child and youth well-being are influenced by multiple nested contexts, including family, school, neighborhood, and society at large. Social workers are well-positioned to intervene in each of these contexts and to design cross-context interventions that attend to structural inequities that shape family, school, and community environments. Despite the promise of such cross-context work, social work research and practice are often siloed, with school-focused social workers and researchers primarily concentrated on school and family based interventions and neighborhood-focused social workers most attentive to community-level interventions, despite knowledge that these settings shape and influence one another. This disconnect calls for attention from both clinical and macro social work practitioners and researchers to consider both individual educational and social needs as well as community-level supports together. In doing so, social workers can work to bring about equity-focused interventions to address stressors rooted in multiple ecological contexts.

In this symposium, we bring together a multifaceted panel that views school-related social work research through multiple lenses and considers interventions at varying ecological levels. We present social work research focused on the individual- and family-levels exploring trauma-informed approaches that recognize how environments inside and outside of the school can shape student outcomes, together with community-level research assessing the bidirectional influences of the community and school environments. This multilevel look at school, community, and systems-level research has important implications for practitioners interested in the nexus between school social work and the multiple environments in which children and schools are nested. Specifically, the first panelist will discuss a trauma-informed, gender-responsive social emotional learning intervention, with attention to disparate experiences of contextual adversity among Black girls in Tennessee. The second panelist will zoom out to look at school choice among families residing in public housing in Boston, with attention to the ways in which school choice shapes opportunities and educational experiences for students as well as the stressors it can place on low-income families. The third examines trauma-responsive, restorative school disciplinary practices in an under-resourced, racially marginalized community and finds that trauma-responsive models showed mental and behavioral health benefits for students. The fourth study assesses how neighborhood poverty concentration and youths' perceptions of neighborhood and school safety relate to school-wide academic performance in New York City. The fifth panelist will describe a mixed-methods study of school choice and spatial patterns of student mobility in the context of a public housing community undergoing redevelopment, with attention to the influence of case management services as well as family and community-level contextual factors. The panel concludes with panelists discussing implications for social workers interested in schools as a practice setting, with particular attention to the social work practice implications across practice contexts.