Reflections

SWK 2000 Intro to SWK- Interview a social worker

This assignment was by far one of my favorite. This was one of the first real social
work papers I was able to write, before getting into the program. This paper laid
the groundwork for what was to come, and helped kick start my social work
journey. The course helped me enhance my interviewing skills, and helped me gain
a better understanding of the social work profession in general. For this project, I
interviewed a social worker in my hometown of Shelby, NC. She informed me that
she gained both her Bachelors and Masters of Social Work from The University of
South Carolina, and she had been working at The Department of Social Services
for fifteen plus years. It the start of the interview she made it clear that social work
was indeed her passion. She had such a helping, positive, and welcoming spirit.
She was very real and open about what she did as a job. Her job duties included:
Advocating for children, providing services to not only the child, but in some ways
the parents as well, resident, finding foster homes for abandoned or abused
children, creating and maintaining professional helping/healthy relationships, and
family reunification. She informed me that were five traits that she felt all social
workers needs in order to be successful in the profession and they are: Empathetic,
Patient, Dependable, Persistent, and Flexible. These are all of the things in inspire
to be, whenever I start my career as a social work professional.

SWK 2450 Human Diversity- Ethnic Autobiography

Completing this ethnic autobiography was challenging for me, yet very interesting.
Having to complete this assignment taught me a lot about myself as a person. At
the start of this assignment I was not very knowledgeable about my family history
considering I was raised close to only my mother’s side of the family, and not so
much my father’s. I am one hundred percent African American. I was able to talk
with both my paternal family, and my maternal family to ask questions about our
family history. I enjoyed learning things about my family that I did not know
before. Before this assignment, I had never really had the opportunity to ask these
questions to my family, especially not my dad’s side of the family. There is a lot of
stuff that I thought I knew about my family, but the information was inaccurate. A
lot of the information I got from my mother’s side of the family came from my
grandmother, and her twin sister. On my father’s side of the family I was able to
get information from my grandmother’s sisters, which would be my great aunts.
They all were able to shed light on a lot of our families’ history that does not get
talked about. A lot of the Information in families aren’t shared and often end up
lost if it isn’t discussed throughout a person’s life. Being competent about your
family history is extremely important. Self-awareness is key to being successful in
this profession of social work. It’s satisfying to know that one day I will be able to
pass the information I have obtained from this assignment to my children, without
it being lost or buried with the passing of my people.

SWK 3450 Human Behavior & Social Environment I- Theory Paper

This was my first theory paper, and starting out the thought of having to research
theories seemed so boring and not very interesting. I chose to focus on both the
psycho social, and the psychosexual theories. The psychosocial theory is, a
comprehensive psychoanalytic theory that identifies a series of eight stages, in
which a healthy developing individual should pass through from infancy to late
adulthood. These stages include: Trust vs. Mistrust (oral-sensory, infancy, 0–2
years), Autonomy vs. Shame/Doubt (early childhood, 2–4 years), Initiative vs.
Guilt (locomotor-genital, preschool, 4–5 years), Industry vs. Inferiority (latency,
school age, 5–12 years), Identity vs. Role Confusion (adolescence, 13–19 years),
Intimacy vs. Isolation (early adulthood, 20-39 years), Generativity vs. Stagnation
(adulthood, 40–64 years), and Ego integrity vs. despair (maturity, 65 – death). At
each stage there is a crisis or task that we need to resolve. Successful completion of
each developmental task results in a sense of competence and a healthy
personality. Failure to master these tasks leads to feelings of inadequacy. The
psychosexual theory was developed from a central element of the psychoanalytic
sexual drive theory. This states that human beings, from birth, possess an
instinctual libido (sexual energy) that develops in five stages. Those 5 stages
include: Oral Stage (0-1 year), Anal Stage (1-3 years), Phallic Stage (3 to 5 or 6
years), Latency Stage (5 or 6 to puberty), and the Genital Stage (puberty to adult).
At the ending of the paper we was to discuss our own lives in relation to both of
the theories, and also to the entire profession of social work. This was very eye-
opening for me and allowed me to reflect back on things that happened in my
childhood.

SWK 3480 Social Welfare Policies and Programs- Social Problems Paper
For this assignment I researched SNAP, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program. I decided to focus on this policy because this program is
something that many families today rely on to feed their children. The program
helps millions of low-income Americans put food on the table, by providing
benefits that are timely, targeted, and in some cases temporary. SNAP helps
decrease hunger and poverty by ensuring a monthly supply of food. Currently there
are 40 million Americans who are able to avoid hunger because of this program.
Half of those who receive SNAP benefits are children below 18 years of age. It
helps alleviate poverty by allowing the money that would be used to put food on
the table to cover necessities such as rent, and household cleaning supplies. The
program provides people with stability, and with the stability they are able to work
towards a better life (SNAP to health, 2011). While completing this assignment I
learned that SNAP was formerly known as Food Stamps. It was a pilot program
that turned Nationwide. The pilot program was ran initially for 4 years, (1939-
1943) and was created as a way to respond to severe hunger caused by the
Depression while also supporting farmers. We were given a choice whether or not
we want to keep the policy or make adjustments to the policy. I decided that it
would be best to make an adjustments to the program. In my opinion, there should
be drug test for benefits, the drug test could take place at the time of applying for
benefits, and whenever it is time of recipients to reapply, or update information for
the benefits.

SWK 3710 Writing for the Social Sciences- Literature Review

This literature review was crazy, for lack of a better word. It was my first “real”
paper after getting into the social work program. I chose to write about the effects
of Child abuse. This topic was very interesting to me as a social work major
because at the time I wanted to work in the school system and I knew that knowing
the signs of child abuse would be very instrumental in that setting. The effects of
abuse on a child is greater than one can discuss in just a single paper. There are
major negative physical, cognitive, psychological, behavioral and social
consequences of child abuse and neglect that extend into adulthood and there is
research to prove it. One of the major the negative consequences associated with
past histories of abuse and neglect are often interrelated, as one adverse outcome
may lead to another. An example of this could be an adult who experienced abuse
as a child, using drugs to cope with the trauma he/she experienced as a child.
Through research I learned that a prospective longitudinal study was done in the in
the United States, and Widom, DuMont, and Czaja (2007) found that children who
were physically abused or experienced multiple types of abuse were at increased
risk of lifetime major depressive disorder in early adulthood. This research really
gave me a new perspective on social workers who work directly with children…
having witness the things that child abuse have done to a child physically and
mentally would just be too much for me. In ending, this review of literature was
very eye-opening for me as a person, and as a future social work professional.

SWK 3800 Social Work Practice I- Process Recording

This project was fun for me because it was a hands on learning experience. When I
first learned about it I thought that it would be challenging, but it wasn’t. However,
it was very time consuming but notating everything your client tells you in session
is very important. In this course we learned basic interviewing skills during one-
on-one assessments with clients. Some of those skills included the basic
communication skills along with other skills such as reflection of feelings and
summarizing/paraphrasing to clarify that you are on the same page as your client.
We also learned the importance of confidentiality, and when it is appropriate to
breach that contract. The only appropriate time for a social worker to break
confidentiality is if the client is at risk of harming themselves or someone else, and
in the incident of child maltreatment; including abuse and neglect. My process
recording was about an A/B Honor Roll student who had started being disruptive
in class, and stopped turning her work in. The client came in as a referral from her
teacher who had noticed a downfall in the student’s academic performance and a
change of behavior. At the start of the interview I asked the client “What brings
you here today?” She stated that she had been “angry, sad, and I’m always
emotional.” She continued to open up to me throughout the interview, eventually
telling me the reason why her grades were failing was because her parents would
stay up all night fussing, and she wasn’t able to focus on school like use to be able
to. Throughout the interview I also found out that her parents were getting a
divorce, and this is where the built up anger was coming from. She didn’t see the
connection between her parents possibly getting a divorce, and her anger and high
level of emotion. In the end we decided that she would journal her feelings, and
release anger that she may have by drawing, because that was something she found
therapeutic.
SWK 3850 Social Work Practice II- Community Needs Assessment

The CNA, or in more formal words the Community Needs Assessment was the
first paper that I had to write as a group, and going into it was a bit scary. Everyone
doesn’t write like you, and that was a big issue that we had in our group, some
parts would be well written and others would seem thrown together and very last
minute. Besides having a part to actually write in the paper, my other job was
putting everyone’s part of the paper together to submit it on time. Getting everyone
to get me their parts of the paper on time was a challenge, because we all had
different things going on. In the end, the paper came together well. A community
needs assessment (CNA) is all about assessing the needs of the community, which
is the target population that you chose to discuss. CNA’s generally focus on a
problem within a specific population of a community, which ties into macro social
work by focusing on the larger scale of the issue. The “community” for my group’s
CNA was teen girls of African American background. Our topic was Teen
Pregnancy among African American Girls. My group discussed African American
teen pregnancy as I previously stated, but we also explored the effects it has on the
society with health, education, poverty, values and the different areas affecting the
population. A CNA exemplify its importance through individual exchange with
community organizations. Our area of interest was Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
Rocky Mount is considered a rural area, stretching across both Nash and
Edgecombe counties. We chose this area because of its rural area, and because of
its history of being mostly historically African American.

SWK 3910 Understanding Social Research- Research Proposal

This was the most challenging paper throughout my entire social work career.
Completing this paper, took all the life out of me. It was mentally draining, and
very overwhelming. I went back and forth with what topic I actually wanted to
write about for a while. First, the topic was going to be mental illnesses among
male prisoners then mental illness and its effects on children, then prison
healthcare. Ultimately, I decided to go with Combating Substance Abuse among
Teens. I settled on this topic after watching one of a family friend turn to drugs to
deal with the pain of losing both his mother and his father to drug overdoses. To
everyone around him, he was just repeating the cycle, and that’s what many
expected him to do, but I knew him in a much larger scale, and I knew what he was
capable of. Living with someone who struggles with substance abuse disorders can
be extremely hard, especially if that person is a family member of some sort, and
that’s exactly what he was to me. It was very emotional to see such a smart, loving,
and charismatic person experimenting with drugs. He begin to experience
declining grades and school performance and eventually dropped out of school in
the eleventh grade. When he begin using drugs he was able to focus in school and
because he was high, he was not able to fully perform in school to do assignments
or other activities that require special attention. As time progressed, so did his use
of drugs, and then came depression, a mental health issue. Depression, itself could
very well be the reason why he started to experience with different substances in
the first place. As a social worker, having knowledge of substance abuse is very
important, and may be vital depending on what population you chose to work with.

SWK 4450 Human Behavior & Social Environment II- Theory Paper

This paper was completed in two parts. The first part examined the Learning
theory, and the Cognitive- Behavior Theory. The learning theory proposes that
behavior, it can be learned, and therefore behaviors that are considered to be
malicious, abnormal, or defective can be unlearned. The learning theories of
development are centered on the environmental influences on the learning process.
While researching, I learned that There are three types of conditioning and
learning: Classical conditioning, where the behavior becomes a reflex response to
an antecedent stimulus, Operant conditioning, where antecedent stimuli results
from the consequences that follow the behavior through a reward (reinforcement)
or a punishment, and lastly, Social learning theory, where an observation of
behavior is followed by modeling. Now, the cognitive behavior theory states that
how we think (cognition), how we feel (emotion) and how we act (behavior) all
interact together. Generally speaking, this theory is simply, our thoughts determine
our feelings and our behavior. This theory laid the framework of the popular
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that we all know today. CBT is aimed at
helping people become aware of when they make negative interpretations, and of
behavioral patterns which reinforce the distorted thinking. Cognitive therapy helps
to develop alternative ways of thinking and behaving which aims to reduce their
psychological distress. The second part of the paper discussed a social problem, the
scope, and social cost of that problem, the clientele experiencing the problem,
interventions to help prevent the problem, and the relation of both, the learning
theory, and the Cognitive- Behavior Theory. The social problem I discussed was
Mass Incarceration. I thoroughly enjoyed discussing this topic and this paper as a
whole.

SWK 4600 Social Work Justice and Ethics- Project Paper

The title of my paper for this course was, Enhancing EBT/ SNAP: Making Health
a Priority. I focuses on the correlation between Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program (SNAP) recipients and obesity. The primary discussion of the paper was
how policy change of SNAP, which was formerly known as EBT/ Food Stamps
could bring healthier options to recipients of the program in low-income
communities. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program does a great job
preventing food insecurity. However, it doesn’t do a good job providing or
encouraging healthier foods. Many of the families who receive SNAP come from
low-income backgrounds. These families are mainly concerned with buying the
most amount of food for less money, mainly because they live on low income
budgets that restrict them from buying certain items. This is one of the many things
that hold them back from the healthier foods. Think about how fast an avocado go
bad, verse a nice, fulfilling potato. It’s ridiculous. Throughout the paper we had to
discuss why we thought change was necessary, what the change will be, why is
improving it better than keeping it the same, cultural accommodation, and we had
to apply a theory to the policy and the people being affected by it. The theory I
chose was the systems theory. It attempts to explain the human behavior of an
individual as part of any environment or system. A system can be on the individual
level, family level, or community level. Systems can be defined as a set of
interrelated parts, assembled together to produce outcomes. It is important for one
to understand how a neighborhood’s food availability, and food store shopping
choices are directly related to the food that people in the neighborhoods are
actually purchasing, this is important because it really emphasizes why the changes
are important.

SWK 4800 Social Work Practice III- Single System Design Project

Coming into this class, I thought that everything was going to be thought, and that
Dr. Woodside would be mean and unbearable. However, after the first night of
class I knew that those were all just assumptions. Dr. Woodside made everything
seem as simple as possible, and she always made herself available if we needed
help. When she first introduced this single system design project to the class,
everyone was skeptical, but as the semester progressed we did more and more
practice with the designs, and by the time the real project came everyone was
comfortable with completing it. The project was centered around Motivational
Interviewing (MI), which is a goal-oriented, client-centered counseling style for
eliciting behavior change by helping clients to explore and resolve conflicting
reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object. Motivational interviewing
encourages self-motivation for positive change within an individual. It is based on
the principles of rolling with resistance, expressing empathy, developing
discrepancy, and supporting self-efficacy. The client that I worked with had a
problem spending too much time off task. Her “off-task” behaviors included
partying, doing make-up, spending time on her phone (this included social media,
phone calls, and texting, and just simply doing anything that wasn’t related to
schoolwork. The single system design I used in this study followed the AB pattern.
AB is the most basic and simplest design (Zastrow, 2013, p. 361). Baseline is your
A Phase, and your Intervention is represented in B Phase. During the baseline, and
intervention my client collected data. The client collected her data by logging
everything she did, task on and off task. After the intervention was put into place, I
only asked my client to log the activities that we distinguished as “off-task. Being
able to use motivational interviewing as an intervention was in fact very helpful,
and it definitely had its advantages, like allowing the clients to use their own
motivators and values to make realistic, lifestyle changes.

Evaluations:

 Mid-Term

 Final