At my previous jobs, I was often able to attend conferences and trainings (and generally they were paid for), but working full time in academia I’ve had more opportunities to go to conferences in places further away than Seattle. As I write this, I’m on my way back from Atlanta1, where I attended the 2026 Annual Conference of the CSWE (Council on Social Work Education), which is our accrediting body. This is the third year that I’ve attended (last year in Denver and the year before that in Kansas City). I have some concerns about the direction CSWE is heading, but I want to share those in a separate post.

Last year, I also attended the BPD (The Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors) conference in New Orleans, and LSWO (Latino Social Workers Organization) in Puerto Rico. I also went to the WASSW (Washington Association of School Social Workers) conference in Vancouver, Washington, where I was a featured presenter and shared my experiences engaging high school students in service learning (you can see the presentation Building Connections Through Service-Learning: Experiences and Practice). I always leave these conferences so full of new ideas and things to implement for my students. But all of these trips have also left me feeling a little bit like a jet-setter.

Flighty Passport summary screens for 2025 and 2026
My Flighty Passports from 2025 and 2026. As an aside, I love Flighty and find it so useful. I don’t fly enough to pay for the annual subscription, so I subscribe and unsubscribe for the weeks that I’m traveling.

At this year’s CSWE conference, I’m so proud of my team: we got to present. This was our first year presenting at this conference, and it was such a great experience.

Post by @Jacob@social.vsp.ink
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You can see our presentation slides if you are interested.

I attended sessions on ideas for embedding creative projects into student learning, best practices for engaging with Indigenous populations, an activity on building a brain, one of my colleagues’ presentations on being more inclusive of underrepresented populations in our work, and more. So much great learning.

Last week, I took the kids to Vancouver, Canada, to see Bruno Mars. We planned the trip for over half a year, figuring out passports for everybody and everything else. When I was growing up, I had opportunities to go out of the country with my mom, but this was the first time I ever took the kids on a trip like this. It was so much fun. We spent a whole day wandering around downtown Vancouver exploring, and then got to see The Romantic Tour. I have always liked his music but never considered myself a super fan, and he puts on such a great show and is so talented. I haven’t had the chance to go to many really big concerts like this, but they are so much fun.

In between, I took the kids to the pumpkin patch, had a birthday, spent time supporting my daughter in the hospital (she is okay), and implemented a significant project at the university. I will probably share more about this as I work through things, but this year I designed and implemented the second iteration of a simulated home visit experience for our students. I also submitted a proposal to our institution’s IRB and plan to write a paper about the project that I hope will get published. It is such a cool event, and the students all seemed to find it useful; it got them out of their comfort zones in a positive way.

  1. I updated my blog so that there is a map that plots all of the locations I have tagged in my posts. I think it turned out pretty cool. You can see all of the locations. It also has taken me a couple of days to actually get to post it. ↩