Shirley Huisman joined the Columbia College faculty in 2014 and is the bachelor’s in social work program director. She graduated with her undergraduate degree from Dordt College and earned her MSW from Syracuse University. She began her career in community mental health, and soon intertwined her mental health practice with teaching in higher education. She works from a trauma informed perspective in both her professional practice and in higher education, where she teaches, writes curriculum, and manages the BSW program. She brings her students and the community together in her classes, and has partnered with organizations such as Everyblackgirl, Black Lives Matter, Sowing Seeds Into The Midlands, College Place United Methodist Church, and the Eau Clair Community Council. She has been instrumental in the inception and development of Columbia College’s Master’s degree in Trauma Informed Education, where she teaches on mental health in children, adolescents, and teens. She is also facilitating the start up of Columbia College’s Institute for Trauma Informed Practice, a multidisciplinary Institute drawing evidence based practices in trauma informed practices across the academy. Faculty profile
MSW Online
Please share how you got started in social work.
Shirley Huisman
Well, I tell this story. I had to be three or four years old and we were at a picnic, like a summer picnic. I grew up in Iowa. And we were at a summer picnic in this park and there was this fairly big river that ran through this park, and at one point my family couldn’t find me and of course their immediate reaction was, oh my God, there’s a river that runs through the park, right? So they set out to look for me and they find me on a park bench with this old man and I’m listening to him talk.
I always say that was my start in social work. And seriously, I think most people in social work have a story about how this has sort of been their life work, right? I mean it really is a calling as far as I’m concerned. People don’t go into social work because it promises to make you a millionaire. You get into social work because of some innate qualities you have. Of course, those need to be accentuated and built upon through training, but there’s some piece of you that is tuned in to people, understanding people, in a way that you can try to dodge, but eventually if you’re listening to the harmony of the universe (I know that sounds really wacky) but I think you come back to it.
MSW Online
How else have you found proof of this profession as a true calling in your life?
Shirley Huisman
Another example is I was going to a CSWE conference and I got on a plane, I took my baby of four weeks at that point. He was going with me and I got on the airplane and I’m exhausted because I have a newborn. I’m also kind of looking forward to this trip. I sit down in my seat with this baby in my lap and this woman starts to tell me her story. It’s like no matter where I go, I can’t get away from it.
I had my baby in my lap and she had recently lost a daughter, an adult daughter, and a grandchild to an auto accident and this stuff just pours out of her. You can’t get away from what your real gifts are. I didn’t regret that that happened. It was just another story or example that said to me “this is what you do. This is why you’re here.” And whether it’s for pay or not, that’s what I usually end up doing. I’m finding out who people are, understanding how they behave or understanding how human beings behave. I could live for a thousand years and never be done studying those things.
In college, I started out as a social work major and I left that program for a variety of reasons which I would have probably done again, but ended up going into my MSW program because that’s where I kept finding myself going back to.
I applied to Syracuse University and got in. That’s where I found out who I was as a student and learned how I learn. Also, I just fell in love with the possibilities of what this kind of degree could do and realized what I had to give and what I was ready to learn. It all lined up with a professional career in social work.
I started at that point working in community mental health. Mental health is still my area of practice today but that was 31 years ago when I came out of my MSW program. I still believe that program was academically and professionally the best move I ever made.
MSW Online
Walk our readers through your career path, the different areas in which you worked.
Shirley Huisman
I had an undergraduate degree in psychology and the dirty little secret about that, of course, is you can’t do very much with it and I found myself able to get the same kinds of jobs that I would have gotten had I just not had a college degree.
I really needed to go on to get an advanced degree of some kind and in the work I had done in therapy I really landed on social work as the thing. My path then took me first to UB, NYU UB, and then to Syracuse. It was a two-year program because I didn’t have a BSW and my first placement was at a children’s inpatient unit in Rochester, New York. The second year was at the University of Rochester Marriage and Family Clinic. I came out of those two years and went straight into a position working at a community mental health center that was linked to a hospital. I was in the outpatient clinic as a therapist and we were attached, of course, to an inpatient unit that was connected to the hospital as well.
And so I worked there for two years and it was really absolutely fascinating training because we were in an urban area of Rochester, New York. We worked with a lot of people who were in desperate poverty. We worked with a lot of people who were dealing with chronic and persistent mental illnesses. We worked with a scattering of folks who were having more transitional issues. The kind of work that you do in that setting runs a whole gamut of issues and populations. You get to see some of the very most debilitating mental illnesses that there are, all the way to 16-year-olds who are trying to commit suicide, or somebody comes in because they don’t understand why their wife is doing this, that, or the next thing. And I got really good supervision there as well.
I don’t know if everybody’s career path sounds like this, but I had my first child and realized that I needed to find work in something with my skills that was going to allow me to also be the mom I wanted to be.
MSW Online
Tell us more.
Shirley Huisman
I recognized at that point that a 40-hour work week with 35 contact hours with people carrying that degree of pain and mental stressors was going to take a toll on me. I didn’t see how I could be the mom I wanted to be working that way.
MSW Online
What was next?
Shirley Huisman
By chance an opportunity came up where I saw an ad for an opportunity to get involved in undergraduate teaching and so I applied and the irony of that is it also happened to be my undergraduate alma mater in the Midwest. And so I went back to teach at this college that I had gone through as an undergraduate and so I was there for 10 years.
MSW Online
And this was in Iowa?
Shirley Huisman
This was in Iowa, yep. So I went from Rochester, New York back to Iowa and what a training ground that was just in terms of teaching because in a small undergraduate program, you teach everything. You literally have to figure out how to teach everything that curriculum offers because there’s probably two of you running the entire program in an undergraduate setting like that. So it was a bit of a rocky start because there’s nothing really similar between talking to somebody in an office who wants to talk to you and standing up at the front of the classroom with a group of 30 people who don’t want to be there necessarily or look at you with suspicion because you’re one of those liberal socialists. It was a very conservative community so I was at that time pregnant with my second child and they all turned red because obviously to be pregnant you had to have sex and it was a wild ride there for the beginning.
MSW Online
Sounds like a challenging start and a very different experience.
Shirley Huisman
I was there for 10 years and then in the middle of that 10 years, I also picked up a part-time contracted position at a local community mental health center because I really missed having that direct practice experience alongside my teaching. In the long run, those two things just feed each other so beautifully. In your academic work, you’re constantly working with what should be the latest research coming out of all these different areas. At the same time, you’re working in the field and looking at what’s happening in real-time life. You have to merge how those theories and those models match up with what practice is really like.
There was a flood in the Midwest (I think it was ’94) and I was involved with some flood relief work through a grant. There were people in the farming community who had farms that were in their families for generations who in this one year lost everything, everything. And so the suicide rate amongst the farming community was very high. Typically that’s a population of people who white knuckle it and grit their teeth because you don’t reach out for help about anything. And so that was a really eye opening experience as well. On the one hand I’m in a classroom with these traditionally aged college students, many of whom probably came out of those same farming communities. And then in the practice side, I’m working with people who have literally felt responsible for losing what generations of their family had built up.
It was those kinds of mixtures of experiences that I had during those 10 years that again just solidified who I was as a social worker. I had always wanted to go back and get my doctorate, too. I come from a family where both of my parents have eighth grade educations. And so the leap I was taking was far bigger than just, oh, I think I’m going to go get my doctorate degree. I was leaving a culture that you can’t go back to once you do those things. Does that make sense? Education opens your eyes to things that you can’t see without education, and you can’t “unsee” them once you know them
And the people that you come from haven’t made that journey and they can’t see those things, and it’s like you can’t talk people into seeing things differently. It has to be their own sort of experience that makes that possible.
MSW Online
Right, right.
Shirley Huisman
That’s another piece of my life that’s so tightly tied to my professional world and my professional journey. I work with a lot of first generation college students in my setting now and it’s so fascinating to be able to work with them around some of those issues because they’re coming out of communities that are terribly impoverished. They’re coming out of family histories with lots of intergenerational trauma. A vast majority of my students are African-American. I get to be engaged with them around those particular changes in their life where they’re walking into a world that their families can’t necessarily follow them into. They are feeling a deep passion about the work that could be done in those communities and that vision that they have for that is now shaped by their education.
MSW Online
Many young people are coached to go to college from a young age. Maybe you move away and you get these new experiences and new perspectives that you thought your whole life was what you were supposed to do and all of a sudden it’s like, wait, you think differently than us now?
Shirley Huisman
That is right. That’s right. And I come from a family where I’m one of four daughters and I have one brother and my family were farmers and, of course, who do you think was being coached to be the farmer? My brother, of course. And my dad was forward enough thinking that he really, I mean his wish for all four of us is that we would get a college degree because… This is a phrase that I always use. He didn’t want us to “have to go wait tables at the local diner if something happened to our husbands.”
MSW Online
Yes, interesting. He wanted to make sure you could survive independently.
Shirley Huisman
So how many assumptions are built into that is another question.
MSW Online
Right.
Shirley Huisman
But I look back to this man who was born in 1927 or ’28 and think that was visionary for him to be able to see that and recognize in his own way that as a woman you’re more vulnerable and while he would not use that same language, that’s what he was saying. When you follow that sort of path that’s set out for you, it has consequences that your parents were never prepared for. When you go to college, you move away.
I think that is just a part of that sort of leap from one generation to the next. I mean from an eighth grade education to a doctoral degree is a huge, huge paradigmatic shift. It’s just… And I remember tensions with my dad once I had my MSW and had a commitment to a career that I was doing things that he didn’t understand and in his eyes I was not putting my family first. Now on the professional side of things, I absolutely put my family first which also shaped my career into a different direction than if I had put my career absolutely first. There’s decisions you make as a parent and there are things that I could have done differently except that my convictions were such that I was not going to sacrifice my children for that.
MSW Online
And I love the phrase that you use, “the mother you wanted to be.”
Shirley Huisman
Yeah. Yeah. I always say that the difference between my generation, or me at least, and my parents is that for my parents, being a parent was a noun and for me parenting is a verb.
I got my MSW before I started having my kids and my professional training, and I mean that on not just an intellectual level but on a guttural level, changed and shaped who I am as a parent in such powerful ways that I can’t imagine being a parent without that. At the same time my parenting has helped me understand so much about what I teach.
MSW Online
And then you work with clients that are parents themselves which I am sure helped you empathize in a different way.
Shirley Huisman
Yeah, yeah.
MSW Online
Social work as a career seems so flexible in general.
Shirley Huisman
Oh my goodness, yes. Yes. And that’s the thing about when you’re trying to talk with somebody who’s on the fence about what degree to get. Being honest, a lot of those people are straddling psychology and social work and I just say to them, you need to look at what you’re going to have to do, what steps are you going to need to take in either of those two paths to get to where you want to be because they’re different. They’re different.
MSW Online
Yeah. For sure.
Shirley Huisman
So anyway I did end up getting my doctorate. I came to USC here in Colombia, South Carolina because I loved my teaching and I wanted to get a doctoral degree that would have a focus in working in higher ed and that’s what that curriculum at that point was designed for. I had already written an accreditation, reaffirmation self-study before I even got to the doctoral program and that’s quite an experience to be able to say you’ve done that and I’ve now done it three times. That’s an accomplishment.
MSW Online
Wow. So much work.
Shirley Huisman
Yeah, it’s just so much work. But you get such a better understanding of your program and the curriculum you have and why things are sequenced the way they are and how learning happens and the scaffolding of things and the purpose behind things. There’s purpose behind why this theme shows up in these classes all in a row.
MSW Online
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shirley Huisman
And I always have to laugh because at some point in the end of their junior, beginning senior year some of them are likely to say, you know what, it feels like I’m learning the same things in every class I go to. And I have to say, well, there’s a purpose for that.
MSW Online
Right. That might be important.
Shirley Huisman
That might be important. Think about what that means. So anyway, I did that degree, I earned that degree in 2004 and of course isn’t your personal and professional life always so intertwined, right? It’s like my marriage at that point of 23, 24 years was buckling under the weight of their dad’s chronic mental illness and it was becoming more and more evident that what he had was a chronic mental illness and so with four kids, I had to leave and it was at that point literally an issue of personal and family safety. I was as well prepared for that as I was ever going to be having my doctorate degree. I had some tools to work with that would be able to in fact avert my father’s worst nightmare that I would “go wait tables at a diner.”
At that point I again picked up my practice world and was able to supplement. Teaching is still not a fast track to wealth. I mean it’s actually more limiting than being in practices because I now work in a private college where I haven’t had a raise since I got there in 2014.
MSW Online
Oh, wow.
Shirley Huisman
And the way you get a raise in higher education to my knowledge is either you write grants and do research or you get tenure or you climb to another institution where your pay grade goes up. So again neither one of those two tracks is something you’re in because of the money it’s going to make you. It’s because you can’t not do those things because that’s where your personal and professional passions meet up against the needs around you. To walk away from it would be about losing your purpose really.
And to think about how that operates over the course of a career, I always tell my undergraduate graduates if they have to make a choice between a higher income or good supervision, don’t think about that a second time. Bad supervision is going to kill you and put you at professional risk, whereas an experience of good supervision will prepare you for whatever that next job is going to be or the next opportunity that will increase your income.
Being on your own is one thing when you had a number of years of great experience and good mentoring and you have your own knowledge of self, you know when you need to reach out for help, or you’re committed to being in some style or fashion of supervision for the rest of your career because I think that’s really important. And ethics are a matter of what and where never about when. They’re everywhere.
Decisions that have to be made on a daily basis involve sorting those things out. Which you may not eventually even realize you’re doing, but that’s what you’re doing, and to have missed out on proper mentoring or guidance around those things early on, those become habits that become very difficult to break.
MSW Online
What other advice do you have for students or early professionals kind of beginning their careers?
Shirley Huisman
Find the thing that when you get up in the morning you say I’m so glad I get to go to work today. What is that? Again, where’s the connection between what you have to offer and your passion and the needs around you and locate that nexus or that intersection and as much as you can stay there. That will change and shift over a life career but my first job in middle school, and I lived in an agricultural community, I lived on a farm and my first job was I collected eggs at this egg farm, this chicken farm, that was half a mile from where I lived. So every morning I got on my bicycle and I rode my bicycle down the gravel road to this other farm adjacent to ours and they had these huge 50-60,000 chicken coop buildings. You would roll this cart down these cement pathways in between these rows and rows of cages and, of course, the chickens get all ruffled and there’s chicken shit and chicken food and urine flying through the air. At that point there was nobody talking about wearing masks when you go into a job like that or anything. I would get the eggs twice a day. It was an experience like that that said to me “I will go to college” because I don’t see myself being able to get up every morning and say, gee, I get to go to work today, I’m so happy.
MSW Online
It’s a good thing to remember for anybody that’s thinking about going into leadership or management at some point, too. It’s always important to remember what it feels like to be an employee that does the day to day work with the clients and you can’t forget to appreciate people.
Shirley Huisman
You can ask a social worker to do some of the hardest work in the world and they will do it if they are treated right. And we’re motivated by so much more than a paycheck.
MSW Online
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Shirley Huisman
I can tell you stories of people who one guy literally worked on Wall Street and was making incredible amounts of money except he was so depressed and unhappy with his life that he felt suicidal and the guy left that area, moved to Colorado and became a brick mason and is as happy as he could be. It’s like money… There’s a spark of happiness in money that eventually parts ways at about, I think it’s somewhere around 80 or 90 thousand dollars where pretty soon more money than that isn’t happiness generating anymore because there becomes other stressors that come along with that kind of income and that kind of lifestyle that then begin to outweigh whatever benefits the money is supposedly offering you.
MSW Online
With all of your experience and expertise, what industries and areas do you think are growing for social work jobs into the future?
Shirley Huisman
All of them.
MSW Online
All of them?
Shirley Huisman
I was just looking on the Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning to just kind of get my wits about me and social work is an area where jobs are expected to increase greater than the average. The projected change in employment from 2019 to 2029 overall in social work – this is called “counselors, social workers and other community and social service specialists” – is 14 percent.
MSW Online
Wow.
Shirley Huisman
Social workers are 13 and all other occupations are four.
And the areas that social workers, of course, most often find themselves employed at the top is child and family welfare and school social workers. The second is health care. And the third is mental health and substance abuse. Even now you look at the pandemic, and in my practice that I have alongside of my work at the college, some of the greatest increases in my caseload have come out of people working in the healthcare community. They are so incredibly burnt out and there’s such high levels of stress they live under day after day after day in the hospitals and healthcare settings. The risk is so high for them. I mean they are crispy. And the mental health portion of the field is beginning to see that… That’s where it lands, right?
MSW Online
Right.
Shirley Huisman
Because people are being expected to do so much with so little. There’s so little leadership involved at either the state or the federal level that none of us, nobody, has a sense that there’s a grown up in charge and that’s terrifying. It’s just as terrifying when you’re a kid and there’s no real adult presence in the home. Even as grown ups, we need adult presence in leadership positions and I think that as much as anything is what has contributed to so much worker stress. The policies change every other week. My daughter is a sixth grade math teacher and every week there’s something new that comes out from the state department about needs to happen now or we’re going to go back on this date. And the transition to online learning has been so big for the K through 12, well even the college setting, that getting that rolling but then having every other week the possibility that you’re going to just pivot back to this old way (which isn’t really going to be the old way).
And so it’s nurses that come into my practice and it’s teachers that come into my practice and it’s first responders that come into my practice. I guess that’s another thing that’s been so much more evident in the last seven or eight years for me is the role of trauma in people’s lives and the fact that on top of whatever trauma people were carrying up before a year ago, the pandemic has just imploded all of that. It’s ripped back the covers to expose the social injustice in our culture and the racism and oppression in our culture and there are things that we can’t push underground anymore.