FACULTY
Faculty/Social Work Activities Shannon Mokoro, PhD Shannon Mokoro’s paper “Building Culturally Competent Schools: Broken Promises, Challenges and Opportunities” was accepted for the New England Educational Research Association conference. She will be presenting with Elizabeth Ambe, PhD, from UMass Lowell. The conference is in April in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Shelley Steenrod, PhD A new Head Start initiative targets children of opioid addicts - The Boston Globe, 1.30.17 In a grim indicator of the toll the opioid crisis is taking on children, a program is launching in Massachusetts specifically aimed at newborns, infants, and toddlers with opioid-addicted parents.
bostonglobe.com/business/2017/01/15/new-head-start-initiativetargets-children-opioid-addicts/iUfZBMPGLHzHn5LBcOZe9N/ story.html?s_campaign=8315 Rebecca Mirick, PhD Reflections on a Collaborative Group Approach with Evening Students Rebecca Mirick will receive the “Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work’s Best Teaching Note of the Year Award.” She will be presented with this award at the award dinner of Baccalaureate Program Directors annual conference in March 4, 2017.
Shannon Mokoro, PhD, and Laurie Grant, LICSW Shannon Mokoro and Laurie Grant have edited a book that is under production with Oxford University Press. Several of our faculty have contributed chapters, including: Lisa Johnson, Sandra Y. Espinoza, Allyson Livingstone, Rebecca Mirick, Elspeth Slayter, and Shelley Steenrod. The title of the book is Feminist Perspectives on Social Work Practice: The Intersecting Lives of Women in the 21st Century. Elspeth Slayter, PhD During the January break, Slayter had the opportunity to do consulting work related to fostering community-based opportunities for children with disabilities in the child welfare system in Russia. Based in Moscow and funded by the Eurasia Foundation, Slayter visited a number of programs designed to support children with disabilities in the community—a new practice in Russia which to date takes a more segregation-oriented approach to the support of this population. The bulk of Slayter’s work involved consulting with the group Nastavniki, an organization specializing in mentoring young people in the child welfare system—most recently including young people with disabilities. This makes Nastavniki a trail-blazer in Russia, due to their willingness to step up and support a stigmatized population of children in need. Alexandra Telitsyna, PhD, executive director, is passionate about this work, and has led the organization to embrace the challenge of supporting youth with disabilities to their best potential. Slayter functioned as a consultant to Telitsyna and her team of social workers on the topics of reframing disability and best practices in evaluating mentoring outcomes. Slayter presented information about best practices used in the United States, such as the use of successful adults with disabilities as mentors to youth with disabilities—especially with respect to mentoring around employment-related topics. Also addressed was the importance of developing the work-readiness skills of youth with disabilities and working to counter disability discrimination and stigma that is present in both the United States and the Russian Federation—specifically through empowerment-oriented work with youth with disabilities in mentoring relationships. Slayter also introduced the use of psychometrically tested outcome measures for self-efficacy, self-confidence and quality of life for use in the evaluation of Nastavniki’s mentoring program. Slayter’s work has recently been re-funded by the Eurasia Foundation, and she hopes to take a group of students with her on her next consulting trip to the Russian Federation.
4