Storytelling and social work intersect in book edited by SP2’s Dr. Jacqueline Corcoran

Seeking a fresh approach to prepare social work students for their careers, Professor Jacqueline Corcoran of Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) came up with a concept at the intersection of storytelling and social work for her recent edited collection, “What Do Social Workers Do All Day? Real-Life Cases for Generalist Practice.”

Instead of relying on academic prose, she sought out social workers who could write about their experiences in the style of creative nonfiction — with elements like scenes, dialogue, descriptions, and narrative arcs.

“I kept hearing from instructors and having the experience myself that students didn’t necessarily connect with typical readings,” says Dr. Corcoran. “And I thought, maybe this generation needs a new way of engaging.”

Both a novelist and the author of numerous social work articles and books, Dr. Corcoran is no stranger to creative writing. Her inspiration for the new volume came while she was enrolled in a creative nonfiction writing class. She saw that the genre could provide a sense of immediacy that better captured the day-to-day realities of social work than a standard academic style. In medical contexts, such storytelling techniques are used to improve health care in an approach called narrative-based medicine. A prior volume, “Narrative in Social Work Practice” (Columbia University Press, 2017), edited by Ann Burack-Weiss, Lynn Sara Lawrence, and Lynne Bamat Mijangos, has explored the use of narratives as a means of self-reflection for social work clinicians. For her book, Dr. Corcoran wanted to provide narratives that would help social work students prepare for their careers in generalist settings.

“In social work, we encounter a lot of different, surprising sorts of scenarios,” Dr. Corcoran says. “And it’s good to be able to consider these in advance as a student, to tackle some of the issues that come up.” Stories crafted with a beginning, middle, and end provide a compelling way for students to encounter this material, she says. “It’s a way that we supposedly receive information, and it engages us on an emotional level.”

The director of SP2’s Doctorate in Clinical Social Work Program, Dr. Corcoran assembled the 19 narratives in the book to help first-year Master of Social Work (MSW) students learn about the scope of their field and the nature of the placements and jobs they might undertake early in their educations and careers.

“The book lets people understand just how broad the career path is,” says Dr. Corcoran. “There are so many different places to be working, and with different populations and different methods.”

To identify social workers who could write as storytellers, Dr. Corcoran reached out widely to various networks. “Part of the hard work was trying to find authors who could do this kind of writing,” she says. “It’s not something that social workers or academics are trained for.”

Each chapter provides a firsthand account of a social worker engaging with youth, families, or adults to navigate a variety of issues, such as substance use disorder, trauma, abuse, intimate partner violence, justice system involvement, homelessness, physical or mental illness, and grief. The situations take place in a range of locations, including hospitals, schools, housing, neighborhoods, law enforcement settings, and nonprofit or social service agencies.

In addition to capturing students’ attention and informing them about their field, the narratives are also intended to provide cohesive portraits that students can analyze from multiple perspectives.

“In each situation that’s described, there is a way to address all the facets of the person, so students can see the holistic nature of people and of the work we do,” Dr. Corcoran says.

Published by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Press and reported as the bestseller at CSWE’s 2024 Annual Program Meeting, “What Do Social Workers Do All Day?” includes critical-thinking questions aligned with CSWE’s competency framework for social work education.

 “The text can be used in any first-year MSW or generalist course and is designed to be employed across courses,” says Dr. Corcoran, who also recently published “Your Child’s Mental Health Diagnosis,” a guide for parents. Her latest novel is “Murder off U Street,” the second book in The Academic Mom Mysteries series, which she publishes under the pen name Jacque Rosman.