Cassie DeSena-Jacobs Leverages a Lifetime of Experience in the Classroom

Dr. Cassie DeSena-Jacobs, D.S.W., LCSW, brings to her M.S.W. classroom nearly 20 years of clinical experience treating those who have experienced sexual trauma and patients with serious mental illness. Her teaching is also informed by extensive research on the school-to-prison pipeline, combatting inherent bias in education, and promoting cultural humility and relationship building. Add to that her experiences as a first-generation college student and you get some sense of the deep reserve on which she draws to guide and instruct social work students.

At a time when many students feel their professors’ teaching styles create barriers to academic success, Dr. DeSena-Jacobs continually seeks out innovative methods to engage students. You’ll learn about one—a semester-long podcast project for students in her Serious Mental Illness class—in the interview that follows. Continue reading to discover how her classroom approach in VCU’s online master’s in social work program format helps prepare social workers for a challenging and rewarding field. 

When you arrived at VCU in 2019, you brought with you 20 years of clinical experience. Tell us more about your professional background and how it informs your teaching today.

I started my career in community social work, working for many years with gang-affiliated youth in Brooklyn. It was an instructive experience because it helped me understand what trauma actually looks like. I also had to understand what self-care is. In my time working there, we lost many of the youth we were working with to gang violence and gun violence. 

From there, I started working in a facility in upstate New York—with teens again, but this time in sexual trauma, both individuals who had engaged in sexual trauma toward others and those who had been sexually traumatized by others. That was, again, a really powerful experience. I found that working in sexual trauma is actually my passion. It is my area of expertise. 

From there I became a clinical director at a hospital for children aged 7 to 17, where I gained more crisis experience working with serious mental illness. After doing that for quite a while, I transitioned to private practice. 

Over the course of my clinical experience, I’ve worked in all of these different areas and, in turn, that’s informed my teaching, especially as a clinical instructor. I am able to talk about all these different things: different practice modalities, different treatment modalities and different things that you see in the field. What does crisis really look like? What does serious mental illness really look like? What happens when parents are hysterical, sitting on your couch, and what can you do and what can’t you do, and then how do you regulate your own emotions around that? What is trauma versus what you might read in the textbook versus what we see in children, adolescents and adults? 

I lead classes as a clinician. I don’t think I could have been a great or even good instructor five or 10 years ago. I think it’s really now, because of all my years of clinical experience, that I am the instructor that I am—because I lead every conversation through the lens of being a social worker.

Working with trauma, how do you decompress? How do you step away from that at the end of the day?

I talk about this with students because, for many years, I was not good at it. I would take things home. I’m a parent; I have three young kids. I recognize now that I wasn’t fully present with my family because I was thinking about cases and clients and what I was going to do next at work. 

I think it’s important for students to hear that there is no magic answer. The first thing I had to do was recognize that I wasn’t engaging in the work in a healthy way. Then, I had to start trying every single thing I could think of to figure out what worked for me. 

What worked was creating a physical separation between work and home. I had to have actual time for myself. It was as if I was turning my brain off: Okay, now work is done. Sometimes I’d listen to music in my car. Other times, I’d take a really quick walk before I entered my house. I literally had to have a separation between the two to turn off my therapy brain and turn on my “regular life” brain. That’s been a game-changer for me; it has allowed me to continue to do the work that I do and still want to do the work that I do at the end of the day.

You are a first-generation college graduate. How does that experience inform your teaching style?

I remember going to college a long, long time ago and feeling very isolated. I remember moving into the dorms, feeling very lonely and very ashamed. I still remember feeling like I didn’t belong, even though I had worked really hard to get to college and my family was very proud of me. 

So, I talk to students all the time about what it’s like to be first-generation and how exhausting it can be. I talk about how important it is to be a voice and a person who’s there in spaces with others. I try to be a voice that I didn’t have in college to bridge that gap because that’s what I feel like I needed and didn’t have at all.

In my introduction to every class I teach, I share that I am first-generation. I have yet to have a class where I don’t have students tell me “I’m first-gen, too. Thanks for saying it. Thanks for normalizing it.”

In Fall 2023, you launched a new course, Treatment of SMI (Serious Mental Illness) Through a Trauma-Informed and Evidence-Based Perspective. VCU has also launched a continuing education series on SMI. Why do you think this topic is so popular and topical right now?

The idea for the class actually came from students. When I became a full-time faculty member, I asked students who had graduated to identify an elective they wished they’d had at VCU. I talked to 30 students, and 28 out of the 30 said that they felt like they hadn’t gotten enough psychoeducation or information on serious mental illness. That’s a staggering number. 

So, I took my career experiences and built the SMI class. You can’t really talk about serious mental illness—that is, you shouldn’t talk about serious mental illness—unless you are going to do it through a trauma-informed lens. And because so many people of color with serious mental illnesses are misdiagnosed, it was really important to add that anti-racist component to the class, to educate students through that perspective. 

You also host a Clinical Skills Lab on serious mental illness. Tell us more about that program and its goals. Who is invited to attend?

Skills Lab is held a couple of times a semester for undergraduate and master’s-level students. We offer it online and in-person so all students can attend. 

If a student is taking a class with me, they’re going to be exposed to my experiences, my skills and the way that I teach, but they are going to lose out on the knowledge of other really impactful and incredible instructors at VCU. This program allows students to learn from other instructors. In the past, our Skills Labs have featured a variety of topics, such as how to do family therapy with people in polyamorous relationships, or how to treat someone with bipolar disorder that is treatment-resistant. The most impactful part is that you get to learn from an instructor and their breadth of knowledge who you might not otherwise encounter because they are not teaching your classes.

How does teaching social work through an anti-racist lens provide students with a deeper understanding of the field? What does that look like in the online M.S.W. program format? How is it different from what you were teaching five years ago?

When I started teaching five years ago, I wasn’t hearing about how to engage or how to facilitate anti-racist work in education. I think that, in general, social work can be a very white-centric field. When we talk about social work, we talk about Hull House, we talk about Jane Addams, we talk about white cisgender women. But we know that social work’s origins are not exclusively in that population. I think it is our responsibility as educators to take a step back and talk to students about what it means to be anti-racist, what anti-racist actions they can take as part of their social justice obligations and what that looks like in specific ways.

In my serious mental illness class, students are asked to take a survey at the beginning and again at the end of the course. Only the student and the instructor can access it. The survey asks them to reflect on their own thinking processes and biases. Hopefully, their course materials prompt some internal reflection so they see some differences when comparing their responses at the beginning and at the end of the course.

Every assignment for that class asks students to think about how they would engage in anti-racist work in the community. We ask students to evaluate the skills and interventions used in real life, to ask: Are they anti-racist? Were non-whites considered when the skills and interventions were built?

In addition to providing relevant and challenging topics, you also bring new teaching methods into the classroom. Tell us more about how you transformed the Clinical Social Work Practice II class by having students produce a series of podcasts. How does introducing technology into social work education expand the student experience?

As education and students evolve, it’s really important that we evolve in the opportunities we provide students. In every course I teach, I have worked to ensure that the deliverables are not just papers because I want their degrees to be applicable to real-life settings. 

The podcast project came about because I thought it important to consider how technology could be connected to social work. Instead of writing a semester-long treatment paper, this is a way for students to reflect on how to deliver the material they were learning in a different medium. 

It’s proven to be really successful and fun, and they seem to really like it. We’ve been doing it for a couple of years now. Every single time, I’m amazed at the experts that students bring in, the interviews they facilitate, and how incredibly amazing and professional their podcasts are. Some students have continued their podcasts after the class is over because they find that they are learning and delivering stuff on social work in a different medium that they enjoy. So I think my outlook is that I want students to figure out how to connect social work education to what they are going to do in real life.

Learn From Expert Social Work Practitioners at VCU

At VCU’s School of Social Work, instructors like Dr. DeSena-Jacobs meet the needs of today’s social work students with an education that challenges, inspires, and prepares them for a career of impact. Learn from the best in the field through an online modality that fits with your lifestyle. To find out more about Virginia Commonwealth University’s online M.S.W. degree option, connect with an enrollment advisor or, if you’re ready, start your application today.