Hello fellow Indigenous students! Thank-you for taking a gander at this site and reading the inaugural post. My name is Krystal and I am the current ISW Student Network Representative who is eager to get this blog up and running! This is an ongoing project and it is my hope that over the next few months, more and more resources will be added to the site. Please bookmark this page, become a follower, and/or sign up to follow by e-mail!
Most importantly though: join the listserv!
So here is the first important sharing of information for all you students out there: The Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE) Conference which takes place every Spring has put out their call for proposals to be a presenter! Link here to view the call.
Deadline is January 6th, 2012. This deadline will creep up fast given the winter break so don't hesitate to get cracking with submitting an abstract soon.
Students, if you didn’t know this already – you too can present a paper! I encourage any student out there who has a good paper you may be working on this term, or perhaps might be working on next term that you would like to publish in some form or another, to write up/submit your abstract of your paper for this conference.
I personally am thinking of submitting an abstract to present a poster. Feel like being creative and sharing my MSW research project. See, its simple, you all can do it too!
Presenting at conferences is a great skill and asset to your future career, especially for those who are interested in pursuing graduate studies (and those who already are). Presentations bolster CV’s, and are generally great experience for practicing public speaking skills and getting the chance to travel and meet new people.
This year’s conference (which is always held in conjunction with the HUGE Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences; where multiple conferences are held simultaneously at the same location) will be hosted at Wilfrid Laurier University & Renison College of the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON from May 28th – May 31st, 2012.
There are student rates for conference registration fees etc, but certainly funding is always an issue for us students. So you will have to look into the resources available to you; perhaps at your school and see what support you might be able to gather should your abstract/poster be accepted.
Now I am not the expert on this (and could be wrong), but from my knowledge, just about every accredited School of Social Work in Canada is supposed to send a student representative to the CASWE conference to take part in any member voting (aka the AGM) that occurs in the day or two before all the presentations start. As well, these student representatives form the majority of the CASWE Student Standing Committee meetings that also occur during the CASWE conference. So ask your social work department about this if you are interested in becoming involved as a student rep - as usually schools will have some money allocated to send their student rep to the conference.
So attending the CASWE conference can kind of be a big deal for some, and a great experience for students.
As the current Indigenous student rep (in layman’s terms) let me tell you that WE NEED MORE INDIGENOUS STUDENT REPRESENTATION at the CASWE conference & involved with CASWE happenings such as the Student Standing Committee meetings that get held in the first day or so of the conference.
This is the major reason why this network was created! Since this whole Indigenous social work student network is still in its infancy, I am going to work hard this year to try and secure some funding that will allow the next ISW Student Rep(s) to be able to fly to the CASWE conference and bring forth their voice and Indigenous presence. ...
... I will talk more about that at a later date, as I hope to get feedback from all Indigenous students who interact with this network (once we can figure out the best way to do that) to figure out the best process for turning over the ISW Student Rep position to the next person. For now, baby steps...
Okay back to the call for proposals. Please take a look at the link and think about it!
Oh – exciting news, how did I almost forget! If you link to the PDF document on the CASWE call for proposals webpage, make sure to read the whole document and near the bottom you will see a special call out just for students about a competition which uses ‘Digital Storytelling’. I think this is fantastic, and I am excited to see what awesome things students come up with. Wouldn’t it be so amazingly fabulous if an Indigenous student won the competition…or at least is represented among the mix?! Think about it!
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