Editorial

I had the pleasure and the opportunity as Editor of this journal to attend the 58th and

most recent Annual Program Meeting (APM) for the American Council on Social

Work Education (CSWE) held in Washington, DC (9–12 November 2012). This 3-day

event, as always, was huge by European standards involving 2300 social work educator

participants and 600 educational sessions. It occurred a week after Hurricane Sandy

had hit New York and the Eastern Seaboard and the effects had been very directly felt

by many participants. The APM was also only two days after President Obama was re-

elected and it was as if the Republican Contender Mitt Romney was invisible. If there

were Romney supporters at this APM then they were being quiet.Mildred ‘Mit’ Joyner, the very dynamic outgoing ‘Chair’ of CSWE and a powerful

figurehead for American social work educators, welcomed participants. Mit gave an

impassioned and provocative opening speech, speaking to the APM on the theme

‘Social Work: A Capital Venture’. A key emphasis was the importance of investing

resources ‘to advance social work as a profession and as a science’. She suggested that

social work in the USA is at a crossroads and the challenge is to know how to move

forward whilst addressing complex disparities. One proposal was that a systemic

approach might be more helpful than focusing on single issues or projects. Another

was that the importance of partnership working with others should be emphasised as

this promoted equity and social justice. Social work educators who are now in

Congress either as elected representatives or as staffers were given as examples of social

workers gaining power.Dr Darla Spence Coffey, the incoming ‘President’ (a title change from ‘Chair’), then

gave an inaugural speech on the importance of social work educators being involved

more broadly in developments in higher education, asking ‘Can we save social work

education without saving Higher Education?’ She suggested we must engage with

innovations and enumerated several, arguing that we need to engage with such

developments. The first referred to the massive free open online courses, or MOOCS,

which have generated recent articles in The Guardian and the Times Higher Education

Supplement in the UK. There is considerable concern in the USA about the spread of

the MOOCS and the fallout from these in a context where student fees are significantly

increasing. Secondly, and more familiar to European audiences, she suggested there

needs to be more attention to developing interprofessional programmes, criticising the

recently revised Educational Policy Accreditation Standards (2008) for insufficiently

addressing this topic. And third, she suggested programmes need to develop pathways

to paraprofessional roles to secure their position in a changing workplace.CSWE is very active in acknowledging the achievements of its members and this

year these included two Significant Lifetime Achievement Awards. The first award was

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

Social Work Education, 2013Vol. 32, No. 1, 1–2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02615479.2012.760958

made to Charles D. Garvin for his lifetime work both on advancing doctoral education

in social work and on advancing social work with groups. The second was to ElainePinderhughes for her ground breaking work and extraordinary influence on cultural

and competency education within the context of socially constructed power in diversecommunities. A Distinguished Recent Contributions Award was made to Patricia

J. Volland for her leadership in the field of social work with adults. She founded theSocial Work Leadership Institute at the New York Academy of Medicine and partnered

with the John A. Hartford Foundation to create the Hartford Partnership Program forAging Education, which, along with a leadership Academy for Deans and Directors ofSchools of Social Work, have helped in training deans, educators and students in more

than 70 social work programmes across 33 states.I returned from CSWE feeling that the strength of North American social work

educators is enviable. Their preoccupations are not much different than those in otherEnglish speaking programmes, but there are several key differences compared with

countries like the UK. Not only do they have the membership numbers, but they havean established and well-resourced organisation which provides leadership and is

connected to sites of power in Washington. This gives them a credible voice with whichto speak for social work education. However, they do not have a strong service user

voice, which for a UK social work educator is striking in its absence.In this issue, we are pleased to continue our international spread of publications and

include eight articles on social work education from seven countries including

England, Italy, Northern Ireland, Hong Kong, the USA, New Zealand and Australia.

Professor Imogen Taylor (Editor)

University of Sussex

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