A group of students chat outside during the 2022 Social Work Summit.
For decades, the Boston College School of Social Work has required students to reflect on their experiences in the classroom and the field.
The exercise has stood as a pillar of the University’s long-held commitment to formative education—a guided process that has helped students find purpose, live fulfilling lives, and understand the world around them.
Now BCSSW’s Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Initiative, which works to develop policies and practices that promote a caring, respectful, and inclusive community, is bringing student formation to the forefront of its mission.
EJI leaders have named “Contemplation in Formation” as the initiative’s theme for the 2024-2025 academic year, calling on students to spend time in self-reflection to look within, make sense of their experiences, and identify their deepest desires.
“The fact is that we’ve been doing this for decades. And in the School of Social Work, we are all about student formation,” said Rocío Calvo, professor and assistant dean for Equity, Justice, and Inclusion at BCSSW. “The only difference now is that we are being intentional in naming it, in bringing it to the table, and saying, listen, ‘This is who we are, this is what we’re doing, let’s put it to the forefront. It’s part of our DNA, it’s our identity.’”
The theme derives from the term “contemplative in action,” coined by Jérôme Nadal, a Jesuit priest who worked closely with St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus.
Here’s how Nadal described the term in his spiritual journal, sometime in the 1500s: “I do not want you to be devout and spiritual only when you celebrate Mass or when you are in prayer,” he wrote some 500 years ago. “I want you to be spiritual and devout when you devote yourself to an activity, so that in your very works there will radiate a full force of the spirit, of grace, and of devotion.”
Students in the Latinx Leadership Initiative participate in a range of community-building activities at the program’s annual retreats.
As a Jesuit, Catholic University, BC is rooted in a world view that calls students to learn, to search for truth, and to live in service to others. Much like Nadal, it urges students to look inward but always reach out—to develop their minds and talents to use them to foster the common good.
It is in keeping with these values that John T. Butler, S.J., Haub Vice President for the Division of Mission and Ministry at BC, will discuss the role of contemplation in formation at BCSSW’s annual Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Lecture and Distinguished Alumni Awards Celebration in October. EJI leaders said that the Student Collective, which oversees nine student groups and committees dedicated to promoting acceptance and inclusion, will help design future programming focused on the theme of “Contemplation in Formation.”
“The real invocation of a contemplative in formation is someone who is not afraid to step off into a messy situation to do the work while reflecting on that as a part of their practice,” said Samuel Lewis Bradley, Jr., the associate dean of academic planning and MSW program director at BCSSW. “We really have to work toward forming students who feel unafraid and brave to be wrong and to express themselves.”
BCSSW’s long tradition of formative education includes classroom discussion, self-reflection, off-campus retreats, and collaboration with communities to solve complex social problems—discrete parts of an MSW degree that coalesce into a larger whole to help students become their best selves. In each case, students assume the role of a contemplative in formation, searching for ways to use their skills in service to others.
In the classroom, students routinely discuss the “Three Key Questions,” Fr. Michael Himes’ framework for vocational discernment that has become woven into the fabric of reflection at BC. The three questions—“What brings you joy? What are you good at? And who does the world need you to be?”—also serve as one of the primary pillars of BCSSW’s annual Social Work Summit, Latinx Leadership Initiative Summit, and Black Leadership Initiative Summit.
Students in the Black Leadership Initiative play a game at one of the program’s annual retreats.
Students who attend these annual retreats exemplify contemplatives in formation, participating in organized activities aimed at identifying their future goals, developing their spiritual selves, and reflecting on their shared desire to serve people in need.
As part of BCSSW’s experiential learning program, students are required to reflect on their experiences at their field agencies. Through written recordings, students examine their own emotions and reactions to the conditions they are working to address, giving them opportunities to explore personal issues that might influence decision making.
“As social workers, we look at ourselves and increase our self-awareness through the work that we do,” said Teresa Schirmer, associate dean of student experience. “With practicum reflections, students are very honest and vulnerable, and write down what they remember thinking and feeling about their interactions.”
Students also meet with their field advisors every month for seminars focused on a particular theme, be it competency, ethics, or another topic germane to the formation of MSW practitioners. It is during these monthly meetings, held in small groups, that students reflect on the interplay between their practical learning in the field and their theoretical learning in the classroom.
A few weeks ago, Bradley summed up the importance of student formation in an email to part-time faculty announcing the initiative’s theme for the year. “Formation is more than a buzzword in Jesuit education,” he wrote. “It is a process meant to guide our students and community toward the greatest good.”
