The 6 Continents Project: A method for linking social work classrooms across the world through asynchronous video uploading

Social work is a global profession, yet many social work students have little understanding of the varied social, political, and cultural realities impacting social work in other countries. To develop understanding of the global context of social work, an asynchronous video uploading project, called the 6 Continents Project, was constructed to link social work classrooms on 6 continents. Social work faculty members with English-speaking classrooms, one from each continent of the world (not Antarctica), were recruited at the 2010 Hong Kong Joint World Conference on Social Work and Social Development. The project was coordinated through The Univ. of North Carolina at Charlotte in the U.S. (representing North America) and the partners were: the University of the West Indies in Tobago (South America); City Univ. of Hong Kong (Asia); Griffith Univ. in Queensland, Australia; Linnaeus Univ. in Kalmar, Sweden (Europe); and, National Univ. of Lesotho (Africa). During the 2010-2011 academic year, faculty members on each continent worked with selected students in their social work classrooms to video-record their responses to a sequence of prompting questions, including ‘what do you see are the most pressing social problems in your region?’, and ‘what does diversity mean in your location?’. These video responses to the same prompting questions were uploaded to a virtual 6 continents project webpage, where all classrooms had access to view all the videos. The process of asynchronous uploading allowed students to view, and then respond back via video to students in classrooms around the world without concern for time zone synchronization. Students developed relationships across cultures/ continents through responses to each other’s video postings. Preliminary data collected show that the project was successful in broadening students’ perspectives of international social work and awareness of social problems around the world. This innovative model is suitable for building relationships between social work academic programs or social service agencies across countries. As social work practice continues to become globalized, this method for sharing of ideas and perspectives is useful because of its low cost and cutting-edge use of technology. Beyond social work, the process of leveraging video to develop relationships through social media is appropriate for use across many disciplines.