What Do Social Workers Do All Day? engages readers in a meaningful exploration of the field of social work, featuring real-life challenges described in real-life language.

Diverging from traditional textbooks, What Do Social Workers Do All Day? Real-Life Cases for Generalist Practice, edited by Jacqueline Corcoran, PhD, LCSW, makes educational content engaging and relatable by leveraging our natural human propensity for storytelling. Written in the style of narrative-based medicine, What Do Social Workers Do All Day? gives readers a glimpse into the real-world scenarios faced by social workers in various settings, including hospitals, schools, law enforcement/criminal justice, child welfare, and other nonprofit and social service agencies. Discussion questions built around the Council on Social Work Education’s 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards create space for students to identify, learn, and understand complex, ambiguous phenomena in an active classroom and develop their critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. Suitable for use across the generalist curriculum for classroom dialogues, individual assignments, and small-group tasks, students and educators alike will find wisdom and inspiration in these entertaining and thought-provoking stories.

Contributors

Julie Cooper Altman, Jacqueline Corcoran, Yvonne Eaton-Stull, Issa Essman, Lourdes Dolores Follins, Jaclyn French, David Hornung, Liat Katz, Derrelynn Perryman, Sarah Kye Price, Brie Radis, Andrea Galiette Skoglund, Lisa Stillion, Brianna Suslovic, and Katharine Wenocur.

About the Editor

Jacqueline Corcoran, PhD, LCSW, has been a social work educator for 25 years and a social worker for more than 33 years. She is a professor at the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Doctorate in Clinical Social Work program. Dr. Corcoran’s areas of scholarship include adult and youth mental health, and her methodological specialty involves systematic reviews. She has 18 in-press or published textbooks that are used throughout schools of social work. In addition, Dr. Corcoran writes creatively and has taken many creative writing classes and workshops over the years, including at the University of Michigan; Virginia Commonwealth University; the University of Richmond; the Writer’s Center, in Bethesda, Maryland; the Writers’ League of Texas; Austin Screenwriters; the Dallas Playwrights’ Workshop; the Virginia Screenwriters’ Forum; the Creative Nonfiction Foundation; and Writers, Inc. She has authored A Surrealist Affair (Entangled Publishing) and Murder in Georgetown (Speaking Volumes). Dr. Corcoran recently served on the advisory program and marketing board for First Person Arts, in Philadelphia.


Endorsements

"Professor and novelist Jacqueline Corcoran's What Do Social Workers Do All Day? Real-Life Cases for Generalist Practice bridges the gap between theory and practice. Corcoran portrays social workers' varied and affecting roles in compelling narratives set in 19 different practice settings. This book is a valuable guide for practitioners, students, and faculty, and is essential, recommended reading for anyone committed to making the profession of social work a more humanist and realistic vocation."
—Goutham M. Menon, PhD, MA, MBA | Professor & Former Dean, School of Social Work, Loyola University Chicago

"What Do Social Workers Do All Day? Real-Life Cases for Generalist Practice is a groundbreaking accomplishment and valuable teaching–learning resource. Detailed case studies, in social workers’ own words, provide a comprehensive portrayal of what we do, why we do it, and our own cognitive processes. Each chapter provides springboards for teaching by way of provocative questions that instructors may adapt to written assignments and interactive in-person and online exercises. I would enthusiastically use this book in every course I taught during my 35-year career."
—Daniel Weisman, PhD | Emeritus Professor of Social Work, Rhode Island College