Social Work students outraged by transition to block courses

Massey students doing their Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) in Albany are planning to fight their course moving into block mode in 2022. 

Block mode in this case retains face to face teaching but only on specific days during the semester, as opposed to regularly scheduled classes every week, making the rest of the semesters learning distance-based. 

Class rep for first year Social Work Tyler says the change to block courses is “outrageous” and says that their small class of 25 will be doing whatever they can to fight it. 

First year BSW student Mikaela said that students in her class found out about the proposed change Wednesday 28 May when they were passed on a letter about it through Stream. “We were really concerned. A lot of us thrive off internal learning where we can meet up. We are doing social work; this is a highly social job where I feel we should be at campus really getting involved having everyone face to face.” 

Mikaela said that she and her classmates were not asked for their own thoughts on the changes and the revelation came as a shock. She says they have found themselves seriously debilitated by the anxiety of the last week, preventing them from being able to focus and actually get everything out of their classes. “The decision was not based off our current cohort. What we have heard is that this decision was based off the thoughts of past cohorts.” 

She said that if there was more specific information about what the block courses might look like next year, then there could be further compromise, but it has been difficult to extract any more details at all since first learning about the change. “It was still pure confusion. Every time we asked our lecturers, it just seemed like they didn’t know. It seems like everyone just does not know what this means.” 

Mikaela says that ideally, they would want an entirely internal course, but would be willing to fight for a compromise that ensured first year Social Work stayed internal. “We are not just thinking about us, we are thinking about the future,” she says. 

Mikaela is especially concerned for outcomes with Māori and Pasifika students in the course with these changes. “We’ve been told by one of our lecturers that Māori and Pasifika don’t have amazing pass rates with block learning and he’s worried.” 

She alleges that lecturers and the student advocates were asked by Massey to positively promote the change, but that shouldn’t be the case. “Our class advocates aren’t there to just pass down messages and be the middleman, they’re actually there to advocate for us and be our student voice.” 

Head of the School of Social Work Kieran O’Donoghue says that the college made the decision to move to block mode after consultation with students over the past year. In the letter to Albany BSW students, the consultation is described as “two surveys and student representative meetings with the Bachelor of Social Work Coordinators”. 

O’Donoghue said that one 200-level, one 300-level and two 400-level papers under the BSW already use block mode. “A strength of block mode is that the days will be timetabled well in advance of semester and students will know what days they need to be on campus,” they say. 

Massey’s intention for the change is as a first step to attract more enrolments. The BSW internal offerings enrolment was under the set threshold for Massey’s ‘No and Low Enrolment Policy’ at all year levels, which requires action to be taken to increase enrolments.