BUSSW Creates New Administrative Leadership Roles Focused on Inclusion, Equity and Unity Across MSW Programs
Committed to transformative education, BU School of Social Work (BUSSW) has created two new positions to better support MSW students throughout their educational journey. Sonia Mee will take on the inaugural role of senior assistant dean of programs and digital education and Lyndsey McMahan, PhD, has been named the first MSW director of inclusive pedagogy. The BUSSW MSW programs enroll nearly 700 students living and working throughout the United States.
In her new position, Mee will be responsible for providing visionary, strategic leadership, management, and oversight of the School’s national online program and the Massachusetts-based off-campus & hybrid programs. She will collaboratively develop new processes and strategies by examining non-traditional graduate education trends; evaluate effective online and non-traditional education practices; and formulate policies and procedures to ensure part-time student retention, satisfaction, and program completion. Mee will also oversee student services components across all MSW formats – Charles River campus (CRC), Off Campus/ Hybrid (OCHP) and Online program (OLP) – developing, implementing, and evaluating effective strategies to ensure that BUSSW is an inclusive community for an intellectually, culturally, and economically diverse population of students
Mee’s extensive institutional knowledge spans an eleven year career at BUSSW in administration, program development, implementation and evaluation, student services and teaching. In her previous roles at the School, she has worked with non-traditional graduate students in both the off-campus and online programs throughout their journey from recruitment, admission and enrollment phases to program completion and graduation. Mee also led several innovative initiatives at the School including the design of the Professional Development Seminar, the launch of the First Thursday workshops, and the successful implementation of a new advising model for student services. More recently, she served as interim assistant dean for the OLP & OCHP programs.
McMahan will take on the inaugural MSW director of inclusive pedagogy position, a role created to ensure that BUSSW delivers high-quality anti-oppressive and inclusive instruction. She will lead the recruitment, hiring, training and evaluation of part-time instructors and lecturers across all MSW programs and provide intellectual leadership to introduce and implement new methods of teaching assessment and student learning evaluations. She will serve as the thought leader and manager of BUSSW’s nascent teaching institute to support excellent teaching across all faculty groups.
A social work professional with over 17 years of experience in international development, organizational planning and learning, project management, leadership development and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), McMahan holds a bachelor’s degree in Spanish from Oklahoma State University, an MSW in Global Practice from Boston College, and a PhD in Global Governance and Human Security from UMass Boston. McMahan is passionate about human-centered programs and solutions, instructional design, empathic leadership, equity, and helping organizations realize their mission, vision, and goals. In 2021 she received the Emerging Scholar Award for the Twenty-Second International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations. Most recently, she was the assistant director of Global Field Education at Boston College where she acted as both an advisor and instructor, and established partnerships with organizations in over 20 different countries. McMahan has extensive social work teaching experience at Boston College, Simmons, and Lesley University and is a former Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia.