400

Building upon Child Welfare: History, Theory, and Practice, this course engages students in a practice-based, problem-solving approach to child welfare. Each week, students work with child welfare scenarios to reinforce practical child welfare skills. This course applies practice skills related to the continuum of care in child welfare practice - from assessment to planning to intervention - focusing on a culturally responsive and multi-systemic lens. Students use theories and conceptual frameworks to solve practical and ethical problems in child welfare practice. This course focuses on child welfare practice generally, and, as practiced in the State of Illinois specifically.

This is the second course in a two-semester course sequence: Child Welfare: History, Theory, and Practice is offered in the Fall and is a prerequisite for this course. Successful completion of the two-semester sequence qualifies for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services child welfare certification program.

The Field Placement and Field Seminar provide an opportunity for students to integrate generalist practice course content with the field internship experiences as they develop generalist social work skills. Generalist practice skills are characterized as transferable across contexts of practice, agency settings, and populations. Using problem-solving processes, skills are developed to work at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels utilizing the social work processes. Generalist social work practice is multi-method and multi-theoretical. Agency-based case examples and presentations, seminar discussion, role-play and class assignments provide the student an opportunity to gain professional and peer feedback regarding the application of social work knowledge and the development of social work skills. Issues related to social work values and ethics, diversity, social, economic, and environmental justice, human behavior and the social environment, social welfare policy and services, practice, and research are examined within the context of the student’s field practicum. This course further reinforces social work knowledge and values by providing 240 hours of social work in a community agency during the semester.

The Field Placement and Field Seminar provide an opportunity for students to integrate generalist practice course content with the field internship experiences as they develop generalist social work skills. Generalist practice skills are characterized as transferable across contexts of practice, agency settings, and populations. Using problem-solving processes, skills are developed to work at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels utilizing the social work processes. Generalist social work practice is multi-method and multi-theoretical. Agency-based case examples and presentations, seminar discussion, role-play and class assignments provide the student an opportunity to gain professional and peer feedback regarding the application of social work knowledge and the development of social work skills. Issues related to social work values and ethics, diversity, social, economic, and environmental justice, human behavior and the social environment, social welfare policy and services, practice, and research are examined within the context of the student’s field practicum. This course further reinforces social work knowledge and values by providing 240 hours of social work in a community agency during the semester.

This course introduces students to the purposes, goals and logic of social science thinking. Instruction focuses on understanding and interpreting the social work ethical obligation of evidence-based practice, research design, quantitative and qualitative analysis in the social work context, and illustrating the use of research in advocating for new programming, funding, and policy on behalf of at-risk populations.  The course is oriented toward providing students skills that can be used in learning how to evaluate the student's own practice in the future and in critiquing the research of others. The advanced writing requirement of the General Education Curriculum is successfully completed in this course.