By Antoine Coulombe, Assistant Professor of Teaching and Chair of BSW Program
Greetings Colleagues,
As we approach the end of 2024, I am excited to share some highlights from my work as an Assistant Professor of Teaching at the UBC School of Social Work. This year has been marked by significant strides in leadership, research, teaching, and community engagement, particularly in our efforts to better prepare students for working with 2S/LGBTQ+ populations.
Queering the School of Social Work: SOTL-Seed Project
This year, we completed the Queering the School of Social Work project, which I led alongside Hannah Kia, with funding from the UBC SoTL-Seed Fund. Running from 2021 to 2024, this project aimed at evaluating and enhancing our curriculum’s effectiveness in preparing students for work with 2S/LGBTQ+ communities. In 2023, we undertook a thorough curricular and literature review, followed by focus groups with faculty and students. These discussions yielded valuable insights into existing teaching practices and identified areas for enhancement. Our findings were notably shared at the Social Work Education and Learning Lounge (SWELL) in March 2024 and were also presented at the Canadian Association for Social Work Education Conference in June 2024.
Queering Schools/Faculties of Social Work in Canada: SSHRC Insight Development Grant
In 2022, to further our commitment to inclusivity, I established a dedicated research committee featuring distinguished colleagues Nick Mulé (York-U), Kevin Lavoie (U-Laval), Fritz Pino (U-Regina), and Hannah Kia (UBC). Our initiative, Queering Schools/Faculties of Social Work in Canada, is designed to document and explore queer students’ experiences within four social work programs nationwide. Although we faced an initial setback with our first grant application, our determination led to success in 2024 when we obtained a SSHRC Insight Development Grant to propel this vital research forward.
Photovoice and Exploring the Experiences of 2S/LGBTQ+: 2S/LGBTQ+ individuals encounter multiple types of marginalization and discrimination fueled by homophobia and transphobia. This challenge also affects queer students within social work, a discipline committed to advocacy for equity-deserving communities. Although there is more extensive research on this issue in the US, Canadian studies are scarce and frequently lack representation of various racial and ethnocultural perspectives. To fill this void, the proposed qualitative study aims to investigate the experiences of 2S/LGBTQ+ social work students in Canada. This research, set to start in winter 2025, will include 40 students from four distinct schools of social work across four provinces, employing the photovoice method. This participatory action research strategy enables students to capture their daily experiences through photographs, which will subsequently be analyzed in focus groups. The findings seek to enhance the postsecondary learning environments for 2S/LGBTQI+ students in social work.
Community Engaged Teaching Fellow
In the summer of 2024, I had the privilege of participating in the Community Engaged Teaching Fellow program at the Centre for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) at UBC. This fellowship enabled me to collaborate with fellow UBC instructors committed to embedding community engagement within their teaching practices. Throughout the program, I undertook a reflective journey to assess and refine my teaching methods, particularly with respect to the community organizing course (SOWK440C/529A) scheduled for Term 1 of 2024. Additionally, the fellowship allowed me to partner with Lama Mugabo from Building Bridges with Rwanda and Hogan’s Alley, focusing on enhancing social work education for Black communities. In this collaboration, Lama played a crucial role in integrating community perspectives and experiences into our classroom discussions. He also gave a presentation on the community’s efforts to rebuild Rwanda post-genocide and led a guided walk that highlighted the vibrant history of Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley. This partnership enabled us to elevate the voices of Black communities and their leaders within the School of Social Work. We hope this marks the beginning of increased involvement and visibility for these communities.
Looking Ahead
As we move forward, I am eager to continue these initiatives and explore new opportunities to enrich our curriculum and support our students. The progress we have made this year is a testament to the collaborative spirit and dedication of our faculty, students, and community partners.
Thank you for your continued support and engagement. I look forward to another year of growth and innovation at the UBC School of Social Work.
Warm regards,
Antoine Coulombe
Assistant Professor of Teaching
UBC School of Social Work
By Kelly Allison, Assistant Professor of Teaching and the Chair of the Field Education Program
Educational Leadership is a faculty stream at UBC where the focus of the faculty member’s work is broadly defined as improving teaching and learning beyond one’s own classroom. At the UBC School of social work, we have three faculty members who’s scholarly activity falls under educational leadership.
Kelly Allison, MSW, RSW
Kelly Allison is an Assistant Professor of Teaching and the Chair of the Field Education Program. Her educational leadership activities this year have focused on Indigenizing and decolonizing the Field Education Program, enhancing interprofessional collaborative health education and continuing to provide support and mentorship to adjunct and sessional faculty members.
In her role as Chair of the Field Education program at UBC, Kelly continued to be involved in the important work of the Indigenous Resurgence Project aimed at decolonizing and Indigenizing the BSW and Field Education Programs. Working with Marie Nightbird (project lead) and in collaboration with our project team, the project hosted the second annual Indigenous Social Service Agency Fair. This community event brought together Indigenous Social Service agencies and the UBC School of Social Work community to build and/or strengthened relationships and to learn about the amazing work of these Indigenous-serving agencies. The culmination of educational resources for teaching and learning in the BSW and field programs have been published in an open educational website https://indigenous-resurgence.arts.ubc.ca/
To continue to support and enhance interprofessional collaborative learning at UBC, Kelly has been named an Interprofessional Education Scholar. Her current project with Laura Bulk, Assistant Professor of Teaching with the Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy program, explores what educators mean by the concept of professionalism in health education from a JEDI lens. The findings from this scholarship of teaching and learning project will support a revision of the UBC Health Integrated Curriculum’s Professionalism workshop.
Kelly has also taken on the role of Director of Education for UBC Health where she will be involved in the strategic direction of interprofessional education at UBC. This portfolio includes the Integrated Curriculum where over 2400 students from 15 health professional programs across five UBC sites learn competencies for team-based care. She has also been involved in the planning for interprofessional education at The Gateway to Team-Based Care Clinic at UBC. This primary care clinic opening in 2026 at the Vancouver campus will be a provincial centre for collaborative health education, interdisciplinary research, and innovation in team-based primary care.
Lastly to continue to support and offer mentorship to new and returning adjuncts, sessional instructors and teaching assistants, in collaboration with her EL colleagues, Kelly has maintained the adjunct mentorship program with a mid-term check in and a workshop for T.A.’s on marking and grading in social work education.
