Reclaiming simulation for social work education

There has been growing interest in simulation in social work education over recent years. While there can be several reasons for this, the Covid-19 pandemic critically signalled a time for broader rethinking of social work teaching and learning (Morley & Clarke, 2020), and simulation has increasingly begun to be recognised as a viable pedagogical approach. We note that simulation had been used in social work teaching and learning long before Covid-19 pushed us online. As pedagogy, as methodology – long before virtual or augmented reality, or artificial intelligence came into play – social work has used in-person role play as a form of simulation, bringing complex scenarios from practice into the learning space for students to unpack through a curated experience of it (Bogo & Rawlings, 2016; Heuer et al., 2022).