COURSE DESCRIPTION
This 3-credit fourth-year BSW course introduces the application of skills of helping individuals and families. The course will focus on understanding the stages of the professional helping process, practice ethics, and the acquisition of specific empowering and anti-oppressive clinical skills in communicating, assessing problems, planning, contracting, implementing change, and terminating the process. This course will focus on the following social work practice skills: Assessment, goal setting, formulating plans, attending and listening, support and empathy, exploration and elaboration, assisting services in planning for change, gaining new perspectives, changing behaviours, and endings and transitions. Also, the course will include the study of skills related to practice situations and issues that commonly arise in a variety of social work contexts, critical exploration of the effects of oppression and marginalization on individuals' unique experiences of struggle and distress, and the promotion of empowering and antioppressive practice. The course also emphasizes the importance of therapeutic alliances and the clinical relationship in critical approaches to social work and the skills of writing social work records.
STRUCTURE & FORMAT
The class will meet once weekly for three hours each Thursday morning (9:00 AM – 12:00 PM throughout the fall term (September 14 to December 7). Students will achieve the course objectives through various learning opportunities such as Attending and participating in lectures on theory and practice issues, class discussions, simulated dyad-work, and group work (completed in small and larger groups), guest speakers, audio-visual material, case studies, role plays, and other experiential exercises. In the event of a movement to remote learning, the course's weekly remote learning activities will include content equivalent to three hours per week of in-class time.
- Teacher: Charles Furlotte