Senior Grace Pease took a deep breath as she scanned her notes to share an intense encounter she experienced in the field.
She described a recent day at a social services organization where she works as an intern. As she spoke, her peers listened intently and could hear that Pease was wrestling with questions about values, relationships to power, and assumptions.
Fellow students asked Pease to clarify and dig deeper when she finished speaking.
“What are your values around the people you care about?” asked Marge Hattrick.
“Oh, I’m definitely a protector,” Pease replied.
Pease and Hattrick are part of a tight-knit cohort of students in the Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) program in ̽̽'s Colllege of Education and Social Services. The cohort learning begins junior year, and that same group of students stays together into their senior year until graduation as they progress through the program and take social work courses together.
BSW students complete 450 hours of field experience during their senior year internship equating to about 15 hours a week. On Friday mornings, seniors in the cohort gather for a reflective seminar where they, like Pease, talk about challenging experiences in their work and seek guidance from the group.
“We teach critical reflection to reflect on our experiences and use critical perspectives to make new meaning of our practice,” says JB Barna, a senior lecturer who leads the reflective seminar. “Sharing requires vulnerability, and students feel like they couldn’t necessarily do that without the cohort. That support is essential.”
Barna, who has been teaching social work for more than 20 years, explains that the cohort is a way for students to make connections, build trust, and help unearth values and beliefs about themselves and the world.
“We feel our work in our bodies, and if we don’t pay attention, our work with others will suffer,” Barna says. “In social work, we need to pay attention, know ourselves, and be fully present. Otherwise, how do we sit with people, a family, or a community in pain? How do we do that if we’re obstructed in any way?”
Closeness in a Cohort
The program’s cohort wasn’t modeled after another academic program elsewhere. But the BSW’s cohort learning model starts from the students’ lived field experiences to generate content for teaching and learning, Barna says.
“We work with content like houselessness, sexual violence, the impact of discrimination and really any work we do with people who are suffering,” Barna says. “We talk about pain and suffering contextually, but also, what does it means to be a human in the world working with other humans?”
For many students in the cohort, sharing in the weekly reflective seminar has been a powerful experience.
“I had a tough time initially opening up about certain things,” says BSW senior Liz MacMannis. “But I don’t think I would have been able to gain such meaningful relationships otherwise. I love working in collaboration with the cohort, being in a group, and finding that level of comfort together. We can’t be doing this work on our own, and we shouldn’t.”
Hattrick agrees, adding that being part of a two-year cohort made all the difference as a BSW student.
“It’s a small program, and I see the same faces every day. That makes it really special,” Hattrick says. “I know these people, we can talk about anything, and I feel safe. Things can be really heavy in the work we do. But the cohort fosters an environment where you know these are your people.”
