Does Policy Practice Class Increase Social Work Students’ Planned Political Engagement?

Abstract

Recent research supports the idea of reconceptualizing social work policy courses as practice courses and using an experiential approach. Utilizing Verba et al.’s (1995) Civic Voluntarism model as a guide, the purpose of this study is to evaluate if a social work policy practice course utilizing experiential learning interventions increases social work students’ planned political participation and current feelings of preparedness for engagement in the political system. A pre-test/post-test was administered to students enrolled in a BSW-level and a MSW-level policy course. This consisted of questions from Rome and Hoechstetter’s (Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, 37, 107–129, 2010) survey focused on past political activities of participants; a slightly modified version of Ostrander et al.’s (Journal of Policy Practice, 16(3), 261–275, 2017) survey questioning participants about their plans for future political participation; and a single question asking the participants to rate their current feelings of preparedness for engagement in the political system. Students were more likely after taking the policy course to plan on engaging in policy practice in six of the ten ways addressed in the survey. Students were also significantly more likely to indicate that they did feel adequately prepared to engage in the political system at the post-test. Additionally, the Civic Voluntarism model shows that teaching specific skills of political participation increases students’ intent to be politically active. Results indicate that utilizing an experiential approach to social work policy practice course does positively impact students’ intentions regarding political activism as well as their feelings of preparedness for engagement in the political system.