The Humboldt Social Work Knowledge Commons project began in spring 2023 as an open pedagogy assignment created by students enrolled in a Social Work 456: Field Experience Seminar course taught by Dr. Debbie Gonzalez at Cal Poly Humboldt University. Amanda Dinscore, College of Professional Studies Librarian, worked with Dr. Gonzalez and her class throughout the semester to empower students with the skills they need to engage in research-informed practice after graduation. Because access to scholarly journals typically ends when students graduate, it was important to inform students about the challenges they would face in accessing research as well as the structural issues involved with subscription-based access to scholarly information. As a result of the class, students became more aware of these issues and learned about tools to overcome them, as well as efforts to make more scholarly information open access.Students applied what they learned in the class by finding and contributing one open access scholarly journal article and one freely available resource that was created by, or supportive of, the communities they serve and which they felt would be beneficial to practitioners. They were then asked to annotate these sources by describing their potential value and provide a representative image and stable URL where the resource could be accessed. The Humboldt Social Work Knowledge Commons is now freely available online and all contributions are clearly attributed to the students. It will continue to evolve and change as future classes edit and add to the site, serving as a resource of freely accessible content, curated by social work students, that can be used after they graduate. This open pedagogy assignment enables students to proactively address some of the barriers to research-informed practice they will face upon graduation by creating a curated repository of resources, unrestricted by paywalls or dependent on their affiliation with a university, that can inform their future work and the work of their colleagues.
