Browsing by Subject "law and social work"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Catching Fire: A Case Study Illustration of the Need for an Interdisciplinary Clinical Case Partnership and Resulting Student Successes
    (Sage, 2015-01) Hagan, Carrie A.; Boys, Stephanie K.; Robert H. McKinney School of Law
    There is an increasing pressure calling for legal education’s evolution into building more practical competencies to better prepare law students for practice upon graduation. Collaborative learning between law students and social work students in a clinical setting enriches their respective educations well beyond their respective traditional curricula. By working together, the students learn other methods on how to handle different clients and their unique situations and how to work with someone of a different disciplinary expertise with the same client. This article begins with a law student’s mishandling of an initial client interaction, discusses the advantages of an interdisciplinary education with social work students and then reimagines the initial encounter after the law student has been taught by an interdisciplinary partnership between law and social work schools. Law students gain a better and broader perspective when working alongside social work students to tackle problems that they not only face in a clinical setting, but also will encounter both in practice and in life.
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    Shifting the Lens: A Primer for Incorporating Social Work Theory and Practice to Improve Outcomes for Clients with Mental Health Issues and the Law Students who Represent Them
    (2014) McGraugh, Susan; Hagan, Carrie A.; Choate, Lauren; Robert H. McKinney School of Law
    This Essay is an effort to promote the inclusion of interdisciplinary practice in our work as attorneys and in our roles as clinical legal professors. As the legal community continues its renewed emphasis on skills training, law schools should look to other professions in order to produce more lasting solutions for our clients and for more satisfactory outcomes for our lawyers. In this Essay, the authors discuss their work incorporating social work theory and practice into clinical legal education when dealing with clients who have serious mental illness. With some studies reporting up to 64.2% of inmates in the United States having a diagnosed mental illness, it is becoming imperative that law students acquire the skills necessary to adequately represent them. Two pillars of social work practice, Strengths Theory and Systems Theory, are discussed with an emphasis on the role they play in working with this demographic of clients.
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    Social Work and Law Interdisciplinary Service Learning: Increasing Future Lawyers’ Interpersonal Skills
    (Taylor and Francis, 2015) Boys, Stephanie K.; Quiring, Stephanie Q.; Harris, Evan; Hagan, Carrie A.; Robert H. McKinney School of Law
    Social workers and attorneys both interact with persons from diverse backgrounds every day, yet although interpersonal skills are an essential focus of social work education, these skills are not addressed in legal education. Interdisciplinary courses in which social workers and lawyers learn interpersonal skills together and have an opportunity to practice them through service learning opportunities are a way to remedy a gap in legal education. The authors describe a project recently piloted at a large midwestern university in which law and graduate social work students participated in an interdisciplinary course with a service learning component requiring students to work together on cases. As one component of the clinic’s assessment, all students were pre- and posttested via an interpersonal skills survey. The law students showed statistically significant improvement in interpersonal skills at the end of the course. The results indicate a need for increased support for interdisciplinary education, specifically partnerships between the professions of law and social work.