While social work regularly aligns itself with the social model and distances itself from the medical model, under the pressures of neo-liberalism, social work is often forced into adopting a psychological and individualist approach to human suffering. Accordingly, in many social work education programmes, teaching community social work has almost disappeared from the curriculum or at least, significantly squeezed, and marginalised. Is community social work part of a bygone era? Is this problem more typical of specific parts of the world?
This special issue invites contributions from social work scholars and educators working against this tide by helping students learn how to help build communities and work alongside and with them in the pursuit of social change and social justice. This work is often also referred to as Community Development. Here are some examples of the kinds of contributions we will be looking for:
- Collaborations between community social work practitioners and social work educators that enable educating students in community work
- Creative approaches for teaching social work with communities and groups.
- Examples of best-practice of teaching in these areas – exercises, assignments, and approaches that worked especially well.
- Submissions describing long-term or short-term collaborations between social work education programmes and communities, charities, NGOs and Not-for-Profits organisations. While social work programmes regularly collaborate with such organisations around students’ placements, we are looking for examples of collaborations that go much beyond that.
- Submissions describing community building within social work programmes and the wider university would also be very welcomed.
