Social Work (SWRK)
SWRK 1000 Introduction to the Social Work/Social Policy Profession
The course will explore the profession of social work/social policy, the rich career opportunities within the profession, and the skills and education required. As a result of this course, students will be able to: • Define social work/ social policy and develop an understanding of the profession. • Articulate underlying values and assumptions embedded in social work/social policy work. • Identify various social work/social policy careers. • Explore contemporary social problems/issues and view them through the social work/social policy lens. • View the paths, challenges and triumphs of professionals in the field. • Enhance skills for success: o Critical thinking o Technical Writing skills o Research o Oral presentation o Resume writing o Interview skills
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 1001 Social Innovation
This is a class focused on understanding the many forms and functions of innovation for the benefit of society. At a time when fresh solutions to public problems are increasingly coming not just from government, the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, but from collaborations across the three, we will focus in this class on understanding how to understand need and design effective interventions. We will explore how world changers find opportunity, cultivate ideas, define intended impact, understand competition, and collaborate with other actors. At the end of the course, students should have mastered a set of conceptual tools and practices that will allow them to be effective, collaborative problem solvers in diverse settings throughout their careers. The course has four main objectives: 1. To introduce students to the concepts and practices of social innovation; 2. To equip students with the tools to be able to accurately identify and assess innovation and impact in social initiatives; 3. To train students to view the world from a perspective of social innovation; and 4. To empower students to develop their own solutions to address societal challenges around the world.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6000 The Penn Experience: Racism, Reconciliation, and Engagement
This new non-credit asynchronous course, consisting of six Modules, aims to establish common basic language and concepts for incoming graduate and professional students to facilitate subsequent difficult conversations about race, racism and difference in the classroom and beyond. Using video interviews, presentations, short readings and podcasts, the course highlights the significance of Penn and Philadelphia's history of racism and other forms of oppression, Penn's evolving relationship to West Philadelphia, and Penn's efforts toward greater engagement and inclusion. Modules also focus on implicit bias, intercultural communication gender identity and disparities in healthcare. A final module was designed primarily to address the antiracist work that must be done to dismantle white supremacy. All incoming SP2 master's students are expected to spend 20 or more hours reviewing the six modules and completing short assessments prior to starting the fall semester. Other graduate and professional schools will assign modules to be completed based on their schools requirements.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
0 Course Units
SWRK 6010 History and Philosophy of Social Work and Social Welfare
This course traces the development of social welfare policy in the United States and its relationship to social work. It analyzes the values and assumptions that form the foundation of existing welfare programs and institutions and explores the social, economic, political and cultural contexts in which they have developed. The course examines the development of cash assistance and social services programs in light of the enduring legacy of poverty, racism, and sexism. The view of "outsiders" in U.S. society - low-income persons, people of color, gays and lesbians - allows us to gain perspective on the source of conflict and consensus in American history, which augments material about institutional racism learned in SWRK 603 and content about behavioral responses learned in SWRK 602. The course traces, as well, the roles that social workers have played in the formulation and implementation of social welfare policy and links these historical examples to contemporary policy practice.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6020 Human Behavior in the Social Environment
This course introduces the student to the individual and family components of social interaction in a variety of different milieus. Theories of self and personality are studied, along with theories related to traditional and non-traditional family styles, different social and ethnic groups, and of assimilation and acculturation. Emphasis is given to the impact of different cultures and traditions on individual functioning. Additional attention is given to selected social characteristics of the larger society, such as factors of socio-economic class which influence individual and family behavior and functioning.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6030 American Racism and Social Work Practice
This course explores racism in America as an historical and contemporary phenomenon. It emphasizes the development of evidence-based knowledge about institutional systems of racism, analytical skill in understanding the complexity of institutional racism and other forms of oppression more broadly defined, self-awareness, and the implications of racism for social work services and practices.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6040 Foundations of Social Work Practice I
This is a first of a four-course sequence designed to help students develop a professional stance and evidence-based framework for social work services to individuals, groups, families, and communities. It integrates the student's theoretical learning with the experience in the field placement agency. The student is introduced to a holistic process-oriented approach to social work practice and to methods for implementation. The course emphasizes the social context for practice with special attention to agency purpose, functions and structure; the client system and its perceptions of need; goals and resources and the social worker as a facilitator of change.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6140 Foundations of Social Work Practice II
This is the second in a four-course sequence and continues to examine varied practice frameworks and methods for service delivery in working with individuals, groups, families and communities. It emphasizes the eradication of institutional racism and other forms of oppression along with the integration of a culturally-sensitive approach to social work practice. Attention is given to understanding client problems in the context of different social work practice approaches and service requirements and to increased use of professional values to guide and inform practice.
Spring
Prerequisite: SWRK 6040
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6150 Introduction to Social Work Research
This course presents the broad range of research tools that social workers can use to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their practice. The course emphasizes the process of theory development, conceptualization, and hypothesis formulation across a broad spectrum of social work practice situations. The course includes methodological considerations relating to concept operationalization; research design (experimental, survey, and field), sampling instrumentation, methods of data collection and analysis, and report preparation and dissemination. The course also emphasizes how social work research can help professionals better understand and more effectively impact problems of racism and sexism in contemporary American society.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6200 Integrative Seminar
All Advanced Standing students are required to take this non-credit Integrative Seminar in the summer upon beginning the program. The seminar meets weekly during the second summer session and supports students as they begin their field placement. In order to enroll in the fall, students must achieve satisfactory performance in the Integrative Practice Seminar and summer field placement. Advanced Standing MSW students only.
Summer Term
0 Course Units
SWRK 6260 Health and Social Justice
This course considers various theoretical approaches to justice and health, motivated by the idea that a moral framework is needed to address the ethical challenges posed by inequalities in access, quality, financial burdens, and resource priorities, as well as rising health care costs. The course includes four parts. The first part examines ethical frameworks that involve various approaches to medical and public health ethics. The second part presents an alternative theory of justice and health, the health capability paradigm (HCP), grounded in human flourishing. The third part explores domestic health policy applications of HCP, including equal access, equitable and efficient health financing and insurance, rising costs and allocating resources. The fourth and final part of the course investigates domestic health reform, particularly a normative theory of health policy decision making grounded in political and moral legitimacy. The course scrutinizes the relevance of health justice for governing health at the domestic level, that is within countries, offers a new theory of health and social justice, the health capability paradigm, and of health governance, shared health governance, evaluating current domestic health systems and proposals for reforming them in light of these alternative theoretical frameworks.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6270 Global Health Justice and Governance
This course considers various theoretical approaches to global justice and global governance and analyzes their implications for global health. The course includes two parts. The first part examines accounts of cosmopolitanism, nationalism and other theories of global justice, critically assessing duties ascribed by each that may be owed universally to all persons or confined within associative boundaries of communities or nations. The second part explores applications to global health governance encompassing consideration of human rights and the operation and accountability of global institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization and national health systems. The course scrutinizes the relevance of global justice for governing the global health realm, proposes a new theory of global health justice, provincial globalism, and of global health governance, shared health governance, evaluating the current global health system and proposals for reforming it in light of these alternative theoretical frameworks.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 6290 Health Capability
This course examines the idea of health capability. Health capability is the ability to be healthy; it integrates health functioning and health agency. Health capability helps us understand the conditions that facilitate and barriers that impede health and the ability to make healthy choices. Health capabilities are key strengths resulting from individual and societal commitment of human, financial, and physical resources with the goal of helping people thrive. Differences in health capability explain why, for example, personal skills and determination or health beliefs are not enough to achieve health, why people with even the best external conditions can still have poor health, and why a narrow biomedical model of disease is insufficient. Health capability captures the dynamic, interactive, multidimensionality of health and flourishing. Health capability has the effect of creating a virtuous circle; developing people's health capability enables them to create and support the conditions for their own and other's health capability and so forth. It offers an evaluation of the aim and success of public policies in terms of people's lived experiences. The course is motivated by the idea that health capabilities ought to be a primary dimension in which equity in health and public policy is sought. The course includes three parts. The first part engages with the health capability model. The second part examines the health capability profile. The third part explores health capability applications. Twin goals of the course include cultivating the development of students' knowledge base, values and competencies as well as aiding students in identifying, assessing and expanding their own health capabilities for individual and community health and flourishing.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7010 Health and Mental Health Policy
Effective social policy and practice strategies promote social justice and ensure all individuals, groups, and communities have access to high quality, comprehensive, affordable health and social support services. In this course, we use a health equity lens to critically analyze how health and mental health policies are developed and implemented, and how such policies relate to social work practice, program planning, and research. A broad perspective is used in thinking about health and well-being, accounting for intersectional health equity considerations deriving from race, ethnicity, disability or gender. Key policy issues such as financing, cost, access, and the allocation of resources are explored in the context of existing systems and health reform proposals. Students learn about health and mental health policy through inquiry related to the social construction of illness, stigma, social determinants of health, health and behavioral health integration, and specific population groups such as children, families, LGBTQ individuals, or those with specific health conditions, among other topics.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7020 Social Work Practice in Health Care
This course focuses on key issues in social work practice in health care settings. Social aspects of health and illness, including cultural variations, health beliefs and behavior, and the impact of illness on the patient and the family, are examined and their relevance for practice is discussed. Appropriate theoretical models for practice are identified and applied to practice in the areas of prevention, primary care, chronic and long-term care. New roles for social work in varied health delivery systems and inter-professional collaboration are explored.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7030 Impacting Government: Policy Analysis & Coalition Building
This course focuses on developing a theoretical foundation for actionabe skills in policy analysis and coalition building across a wide-range of constituencies. The material begins with a structured focus on the ideological underpinnings of social welfare in the United States and the ways in which these perspectives shape our conception of equity, equality, and allocation of resources along the lines of race, class, gender, immigration status, and other identities. We will then utilize this basis for developing analysis frameworks, policy briefs, and media messaging that students will utilize when working with legislative bodies to advocate for and with the populations they serve. Distinct emphasis is placed on becoming conversant across differential systems, ideas, values, and assumptions while remaining grounded in relevant research and empirical approaches.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7040 Advanced Clinical Social Work Practice I
Clinical Social Work Practice I and Field Practice builds on the generalist model of practice established in the foundation social work practice courses. The course work and assignments are closely linked to the students' learning objectives and experiences in the field. This course has students critically examine and deepen their understanding of advanced theoretical frameworkks and specific skills to be applied in clinical practice with children, adolescents, adults, and families. Students begin with classic and modern formulations of psychodynamic work and use this as a foundation for understanding theoretically and empirically drive models of family intervention. In addition, use of self and social work values and ethics and working with diverse clients are addressed at an advanced level.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7060 Policies for Children and Their Families
This course examines policies for children and their families with a specific focus on child welfare policy. The course examines the interrelationship between: the knowledge base on child abuse and neglect; evaluations of interventions; programs and policies designed to protect maltreated children; and child welfare policy at the state and national level. The course also examines federal and state laws that govern the funding and operation of child welfare systems; the history of child welfare policies; the operation of child welfare systems; and the legal, political and social forces that influence the structure and function of child welfare systems in the United States.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7080 Advanced Macro Social Work Practice I
Advanced Macro Social Work Practice I and Field builds on the foundation social work practice courses and focuses on three areas: (1) context of macro practice; (2) organizational structure with a focus on nonprofits; and (3) program design and development. The course begins with providing theoretical frameworks for macro practice and then moves to focus on delivery of services at the community level. Knowledge and skill development focuses primarily on social work practice within communities and organizations. Students learn how to organize and build relationships with communities and develop, plan, manage, fund and assess/evaluate community-based programs. Specific skill development includes learning how to research, develop, write, and pitch a grant proposal. Course content is integrated with fieldwork and is specific to the service needs of the popuations with whom students are working in their field agencies.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7100 Supervision Seminar
Students in the Employed Practitioners Program are required to take this non-credit seminar in the fall and spring terms of their second year of study. The class meets every other week. In a limited number of cases, advanced-year students may be placed in agencies where there is no available MSW field instructor. In such instances, the student is required to attend the Clinical or Macro Supervision Seminar (depending on their concentration), which meets every other week during the academic year. Students who are required to participate in the clinical or macro supervision seminars will be given 1.5 hours of compensatory time off from their field placement every other week.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
0 Course Units
SWRK 7110 Contemporary Social Policy
This course introduces students to the analysis of contemporary social welfare policy. Several social welfare policy areas, including social inequality, poverty, health care, and housing are examined. Each topic area is also used to illustrate a component of the policy analysis process, including the analysis of ideologies and values as they shape policy formulation, the process by which legislation is proposed and enacted, the roles of advocacy and lobbying organizations, and the challenges of policy implementation and evaluation.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7130 Understanding Social Change: Issues of Race and Gender
This course builds upon the foundation of historical, psychological, sociological, economic, political, and personal knowledge about institutionalized forms of racism and discrimination developed in SWRK 6030, American Racism and Social Work Practice. The course uses understanding elements of oppression to critically examine strategies for addressing racism and sexism in organizations and communities through systematic assessment and planning for social change. The course examines change at three levels: organizations, communities, and social movements.
Spring
Prerequisite: SWRK 6030
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7140 Advanced Clinical Social Work Practice II
The focus of learning in this semester is theories and skills related to clinical practice with individuals and groups, differential intervention, and the broadening of the professional role and repertoire. The course content and assignments are closely linked with the students' learning objectives and experiences in the field. Students extend and refine their practice knowledge and skills and learn to intervene with cognitive, behavioral, and narrative modalities. This semester focuses also on work with complex trauma across systems and populations. Students consolidate their identification as professionals and learn to constructively use the environment to effect systems changes.
Spring
Prerequisite: SWRK 7040
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7170 Art and Social Work: Art and the Ecology of Justice
How can the arts help us build a more just society? How can the arts transform social structures and systems? Public health crises involving clean water (Flint), police violence (Baltimore), and a lack of economic and educational opportunity following reentry (Philadelphia) make legible the need for a new visual language that critiques these conditions and challenges entrenched structural inequalities. We will engage the work of creative practitioners who are mapping new relationships between art and social justice and directly impacting individual and communal well-being. In so doing, the course seeks to challenge traditional constructions of public health, which often isolate individual histories from their social life and their relation to families, communities, and geographies. Readings will build upon disciplinary perspectives in the arts, humanities, and social policy. Requirements include weekly readings, class participation, and a collaborative final project. The course will meet in the Health Ecologies Lab at Slought Foundation, an arts organization on campus.
Spring
Also Offered As: FNAR 5057
Mutually Exclusive: FNAR 3090
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7180 Advanced Macro Social Work Practice II
Advanced Macro Social Work Practice II and Field helps students broaden and deepen the specific knowledge and skills required to become an effective and creative social work practitioner. The course focuses on five areas of macro practice: (1) community assessment and practice; (2) policy advocacy; (3) fiscal management and fundraising; (4) global human rights; and (5) emerging areas of macro practice. Students learn how to conduct a community practice analysis, engage in policy advocacy, develop an idea for a social enterprise, write an agency fundraising plan, and conduct an agency fiscal evaluation. Students learn to utilize administrative skills to promote social change within a variety of systems that influence the lives of client populations. Course content is integrated with fieldwork and is specific to the service needs of the populations with whom students are working in their field agencies.
Spring
Prerequisite: SWRK 7080
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7210 Social Work Healthcare Proseminar
This is a mandatory, year long, bi-monthly, non-credit course for all students enrolled in the Social Work in Health Care Specialization (SWIHCS). SWIHCS aims to prepare students for successful careers across practice settings and with diverse populations and conditions. Grounded in the tenets of biopsychosocial approaches to direct practice, the specialization bridges systems of practice and introduces students to inter-professional collaboration and leadership skills. This proseminar will serve two functions for students in the specialization. First, the cohort will meet together monthly for case conceptualization, and consideration of challenges unique to health-related placements in both macro and direct practice settings. Second, students will meet monthly for special learning opportunities, guest lectures, and professional development. Topics may include, but are not limited to: direct practice work with children, families, the elderly, and communities coping with chronic and terminal illness, palliative and end of life care, health care advocacy, policy development and evaluation, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
0 Course Units
SWRK 7220 Practice with Children and Adolescents
This course provides a foundation for social work practice with children and adolescents. Beginning with an overview of normative child and adolescent development and psychosocial developmental theory, the course covers various methods for helping at-risk children and adolescents and their families. Emphasizing the complex interplay between children and adolescents and their social environments, consideration will be given to biological, temperamental, and developmental status; the familial/cultural context; the school context; and other aspects of the physical and social environment. Particular attention is paid to working with socially, emotionally, financially, and physically challenged and deprived children and adolescents and their families.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7230 LGBTQ Certificate Proseminar
This is a monthly, non-credit course for all students enrolled in the LGBTQ Certificate. The LGBTQ Certificate provides supplemental content and skills to existing professional master's degrees at Penn with specialized courses and fieldwork addressing the legal, physical and mental health care, social service, and educational needs of LGBTQ communities and issues of gender and sexuality, more generally, across the lifespan. Because students can enroll in a variety of courses across schools to meet the certificate requirements, the proseminar is designed to serve as a shared community building and peer mentorship experience for each certificate cohort. The instructor will also provide an additional layer of mentorship for integrating field placement into the academic social work experience. The proseminar will take on different formats over the course of the semester including case review, guest lectures, and in-depth discussion of issues relating to ethics, identity, and cross-professional collaboration.
Two Term Class, Student may enter either term; credit given after both terms are complete
0 Course Units
SWRK 7240 Developmental Disabilities
This course enhances the students' ability to practice social work with and on behalf of people with developmental disabilities and their families. The course provides a base of knowledge about developmental disabilities and differences, their causes and characteristics. Students learn how disabilities and learning differences impact personal, familial, educational, social, and economic dimensions for the individual, family and society, with attention to the person's special life cycle needs and characteristics. The course also emphasizes legislative, programmatic, political, economic, and theoretical formulations fundamental to service delivery.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7250 Relationship Theory
The goal of this course is to introduce the participants to the basic principles and practice of couple therapy. With its rich history as a distinct discipline integrating both individual and systemic theory, students will explore a broad range of theoretical and clinical approaches within this field. Issues such as intimacy, gender, power, class, race, orientation, family of origin, affairs, separation, divorce, domestic violence, sex, parent-child relationships, and money will be discussed.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7260 Brief Treatment and Crisis Intervention
This course focuses on theory and practice of planned brief treatment in social work practice, primarily with individuals but with attention to couples, families and other groupings. The course covers the history of and different approaches to brief treatment. Topics include treatment issues such as criteria for selection of clients, understanding the importance of time in the treatment relationship, the use of history, the importance of focusing, the process of termination and other issues related to brief interventions. Particular attention will be paid to the use of brief treatment approaches in crisis situations. The course presents various methods of assessing an individual's crisis and of helping clients mobilize their strengths to utilize customary methods of coping and learn newer ways of coping.
Summer Term
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7270 Practice with Families
This course provides students with assessment and intervention skills for social work practice with varied family/partner configurations. The course begins with a grounding in family systems theory and proceeds to explore patterns of interaction in terms of the wide range of problems that families and partners bring to social agencies. Emphasis is given to exploring ways of supporting change in interaction patterns. Readings are augmented by videotapes of family sessions and simulations of clinical situations from students' field practice.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7280 Taking Down the Prison Industrial Complex
The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country, and more than any nation has ever done in history. The racial disparities that mark this carceral regime have led scholars to describe the prison industrial complex as a new form of Jim Crow. Philadelphia has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and one of the largest populations on parole and probation. This class explores structural and individual-level pathways to re-engage the vast population of recently incarcerated people who cycle through prisons, jails, juvenile homes, and other detention centers. Drawing on practice informed by critical race, postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories, the class prepares the conceptual and practice foundations for a prison abolitionist orientation in social work engagement with this community. Utilizing a daily workshop format that incorporates members of the Philadelphia decarcerate landscape, students will be trained in direct and macro practice, to engage with people and the carceral systems they are embedded in. The class will engage students with the innovative psychotherapeutic and macro practices being implemented in the Center for Carceral Communities at SP2, alternative programs in Philadelphia’s municipal and federal courts, educational degree programs at community colleges in Philadelphia, co-operative business initiatives for people emerging from incarceration, and social movements such as Black Lives Matter that are shaping the prison abolition landscape. The class blends morning sessions dedicated to discussions of texts with afternoon sessions dedicated to hands-on implementation workshops. At the end of the class, students will be prepared to immediately start engaging with members of the community emerging from incarceration.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7290 Social Statistics
This course provides students with a broad range of statistical methods and applications. It introduces social work students to the use of quantitative data for planning and evaluating social programs and social policy. Course topics include conceptualization and measurement of variables and basic techniques and concepts for exploring and categorizing data, for generalizing research findings and testing hypotheses, and for statistical data processing. Students will gain experience in using a Windows-based statistical software package on personal computers. Emphasis is placed on the practical application of data to address social policy and social work practice issues. Students have the opportunity to critique the application of data analysis and presentation in technical reports and professional journals.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7310 Clinical and Macro Child Welfare Practice
Students enrolled in this course will learn about the various contexts in which child welfare practice and policy services take place and the skills and modalities that are used with children, youth, and families who are the focus of child welfare intervention. Students learn about the social conditions and unmet needs that have typically precipitated child welfare policy and ideological debates informing child welfare policy. How to structure organizations and implement planning in support of strengthening front-line practice is also addressed. Taking stock of these policies and organizational factors, students gain a firm understanding of how they influence, shape, and govern direct clinical practice in child protection and casework. Particular attention will be devoted to developing students' practice skills in safety assessment and safety planning, risk assessment, and permanency planning. Implementation of evidence-based, trauma-informed interventions to promote positive developmental outcomes among the racially/ethnically diverse pool of children and adolescents placed in out-of-home care will also be a focus of attention. Other topics include separation, loss, and identity development; disproportionately and disparity; and self-care in child welfare practice. In the spirit of bridging connections between macro and clinical practice, course content will delve into how direct casework services influence dependency actions in the juvenile courts. How these direct practices or interventions influence case outcomes as reported by a number of federal data reporting systems will also be discussed. A social justice framework will be applied to understand how child welfare policies and organizational services sustain child and family inequalities, especially for historically oppressed and marginalized populations who are disproportionately represented in the child welfare system.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7320 Integrative Seminar in Child Welfare
This capstone course in the Child Well-Being and Child Welfare specialization will integrate direct/micro and macro levels of practice; research in child welfare and related fields, as the research relates to all levels of practice; the relationship of child maltreatment and other social problems; and perspectives from several disciplines, specifically social work, other mental health professions, law, and medicine, as these disciplines address problems of child maltreatment and child welfare. The seminar will highlight issues of social justice, disproportionality - particularly the over-representation of children and families of color in the child welfare system, and disadvantaged populations, including children in general and poor children in particular. Faculty from other disciplines will be features as guest speakers throughout the course.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7330 Supporting LGBTQ+ Individuals Across the Lifespan
As recognition and acceptance of individuals across and beyond both the sexual orientation and gender identity spectrums continues to progress within the United States, clinical theory and applications for working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer plus (LGBTQ+) individuals has also expanded. This course will explore the clinical theories and treatment approaches geared towards affirming and supporting LGBTQ+ individuals within their romantic and/or sexual relationships, families of origin, and families of choice. Areas of development will be addressed across the lifespan including specific milestones related to gender and sexuality development as well as psychological, sociocultural, and spiritual influences upon development. Centering on a social justice approach, learners will be encouraged to critically examine systemic factors impacting LGBTQ+ individuals as well as the intersectionality of various identities including race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, ability/disability, socioeconomic status, educational attainment, mental and physical health, and other identities (both self-assigned and externally applied) that can impact development. Each stage of development will include multiple cases for review and consideration of potential practice implications at the individual, relationship, family, community, and systemic levels. Upon conclusion of the course, learners will have a stronger understanding of the practice theories that exist, the practice models that best fit their professional style, and clear understanding of practice application in regard to affirming and supporting LGBTQ+ individuals.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7360 Building Community Capacity
This course introduces to community organization and community capacity building. The course encompasses strategies, models, and techniques for the creation of organizations, the formation of federations of existing organizations; and coalition-building, all designed to address problems requiring institutional or policy changes or reallocation of resources to shift power and responsibility to those most negatively affected by current socio-economic and cultural arrangements. The course emphasizes development of strategies and techniques to organize low-income minority residents of urban neighborhoods, and to organize disenfranchised groups across geographic boundaries as the first required steps in an empowerment process.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7370 Bioethics in Social Work in Diverse Healthcare Settings
As medical technology develops and evolves, ethical dilemmas are occurring more frequently in many diverse healthcare settings. Social workers play an integral and unique role in bioethics: primarily as patient advocates but also as guardians of autonomy and dignity. This can come into direct conflict with decisions patients, families, and healthcare teams are asked to make on a daily basis in healthcare settings. This course will explore many of the major ethical challenges confronting medicine, social work, and biomedical sciences. We will examine legal, institutional and personal positions, beliefs, and values as we consider and debate opposing arguments. You will be challenged to think and write critically, utilizing philosophical, bioethical, and social work frameworks to structure your arguments and ethical decision making. This course will prepare students to actively participate in ethics committees, mediation, patient/family conferences with diverse populations and interdisciplinary collaborative discussions regarding ethical issues in medical settings.
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7380 Anxiety and Depression
Anxiety and depression are two of the most common mental disorders seen in social work clients, and frequently they occur concurrently. This course describes the medical and "physical" concomitants and psychosocial factors associated with both conditions and introduces diagnostic and assessment procedures and methods of intervention that social workers use in working with clients with these conditions. The course also considers how culture, social class, gender, and other social differences affect the expression of these disorders and their concomitant treatment.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7390 Illness and Family Caregiving
This course focuses on social work practice in medicine and the relationships between physical health, social environments, and psychosocial functioning. Student learning will be grounded in the biopsychosocial-spiritual model, and will address a number of domains, including the impact of illness on families over the life course, the impact of a diagnosis on family functioning, medical decision making, coping, health beliefs and spirituality, culture and social class. Classroom content will include conceptualization of illness challenges from the presentation/prevention of symptoms to the end of life, in addition to writing case material, building self-awareness and identifying clinical interface issues, and the compilation of a "clinician's toolbox" for direct practice on the front lines. Activities will include the unique opportunity to participate in hands-on, interdisciplinary training at the Simulation Center in the School of Nursing.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7400 Strategic Planning & Resource Development for Public & Nonprofit Organizations
Resilient organizations engage in a continuous process of self-review and refocusing. Referred to as "strategic planning," this process requires the active participation of a broad range of agency "stakeholders" who, in their work together, seek to realign the organization's goals, structures, and programs to make them more responsive to the changing needs of their service populations. Building on the content of foundation practice foundation courses, "Strategic Planning and Resource Development" has been designed to strengthen the the student's leadership capacity for engaging in strategic planning and resource development practice across a broad range of governmental (GOs) and civil society organizations (CSOs). The importance of organizational flexibility, innovation, and the creation of cooperative public-private partnerships is emphasized throughout the course.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7410 Gender & Social Policy
Gender and Social Policy develops an advanced understanding of social policies through the lens of gender - a socially constructed classification system based on ideals of femininity and masculinity, which are most commonly understood to be binary, mutually exclusive categories corresponding to sex (female and male). (Gender is) a concept that pervades all aspects of culture: structuring institutions, social identities, cultural practices, political positions, historical communities, and the shared human experience of embodiment*. The class provides students with the opportunity to explore how social policies respond (and contribute) to the needs and risks of different groups of people based on gender classifications. Rather than a survey of "gender" policy, students will be introduced to key feminist and trans concepts and frameworks that can be applied to any social issue and policy intervention. Policy examples may include reproduction, state violence, exclusionary/inclusive space, and national emergencies. The topics and specific readings may change based on the class's interests and current events. Class assignments are designed to provide an opportunity to practice applying gender theory, as well as for each student to examine a policy issue of import to them through a gendered lens. *Paraphrasing Garland-Thomson, 2002, "Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory", NWSA Journal, 14(3): pg 4.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
Also Offered As: MSSP 7410
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7420 Practice with Youth Who are Marginalized
The discourse on juvenile justice in the United States, once driven by themes of treatment and rehabilitation, has been dominated in recent years by vocabularies of punishment and incapacitation. The juvenile court, an enterprise founded by social reformers and the social work profession at the turn of the century to "save children," is now under severe political and legislative pressure to impose harsher penalties on younger and younger offenders who are increasingly portrayed as violent "super-predators," while its most vulnerable segments, children and youth, stand in greatest need of what a social service system can offer. Not surprisingly, those most likely to wind up under supervision are economically poor, under-educated, disproportionately of color and disproportionately at-risk to become victims of violent crimes. How does the profession situate itself in this discourse and what are individual social workers to do?
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7430 Action Research
Action research is a form of social research that combines research with intervention. It is characterized by a collaborative relationship between the researcher and a client organization that is in an immediate problematic situation. The research process is directed toward addressing the problem situation and producing knowledge that contributes to the goals of social science. Action research is compatible with many of the values and principles of social work. This course also addresses issues of social work ethics and values encountered by the action researcher.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: SWRK 6150
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7440 Direct Practice Research
This course provides graduate social work students with research knowledge and skills aimed at enhancing their direct practice with clients. The course examines methods of assessment, methods for choosing and evaluating techniques of intervention, methods for determining the effectiveness of practice and the use of research in social work decision-making. A successful outcome of the course will be that students perceive a more positive relationship between research and social work practice and possess a set of tools that they will be able to utilize in their future careers as social workers. The course starts from an assumption that students have some familiarity with research and are primarily engaged in direct practice with individuals, families or groups.
Fall
Prerequisite: SWRK 6150
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7450 Critical Race Theory
This course explores Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT refers to a body of work that emerged during the 1980s and 90s among legal educators to try and explain why there seemingly has been racial progress on the one hand through laws and court decisions that outlaw the most visible symbols of racial discrimination, but growing signs of racial inequality on the other in education, health, criminal justice, housing, politics, and other areas. During the past ten years, fields such as women’s studies, sociology, education, gender studies, history, criminology, and postcolonial studies have begun to look to the insights developed by critical race theorists. Without a doubt, CRT has spawned and/or influenced new areas of inquiry such as Latino/a critical studies, queer studies, critical race feminism, and critical white studies. Although social work researchers have begun to use CRT ideas such as intersectionality, the application of Critical Race Theory to the field remains largely unexplored.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7460 Political Social Work
This course focuses on the role of social workers and the social work profession in advocacy and the political arena. It examines the methods of advocacy (e.g., case, class, and legislative) and political action through which social workers can influence social policy development and community and institutional change. The course also analyzes selected strategies and tactics of change and seeks to develop alternative social work roles in the facilitation of purposive change efforts. Topics include individual and group advocacy, lobbying, public education and public relations, electoral politics, coalition building, and legal and ethical dilemmas in political action.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7470 Social Policy and the LGBTQ Community
The course will explore and analyze the development of social policy within the context of LGBTQ social movements both assimilationist and liberationist. Among the policies examined are HIV/AIDS, Defense of Marriage Act, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Same-Sex Marriage, Adoption of Children, the DSM and Pathologizing the LGBT Community, Legal Issues, Non-Discrimination, and Hate Law Legislation. Social Services for the LGBTQ community will be discussed as well as support for LGBTQ youth. The particular difficulties confronting transpeople and their acceptance will be examined in the context of the social construction of gender; in this, the work of philosophers Judith Butler and Michel Foucault will be introduced. Questions of social justice will be threaded throughout the course, as will social work advocacy and coalition building.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7480 Microfinance and Women's Empowerment in India
This course examines microfinance and its engagement with marginalized communities such as those in India. It is designed to provide students with an understanding of the phenomena of microfinance and its role in poverty alleviation. By studying the use of self-help groups with NGO facilitation, their impact on women's empowerment will be examined and understood through interaction with women engaged in microfinance activities.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7490 Civil Society Addressing Conflict in Israel/Palestine
This course offers a unique opportunity to experience the challenges and complexities of coexistence in Israel, the Holy Land for Christians, Jews and Muslims; a key point of interest and dispute for the international community, and the homeland shared and claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians. The course will focus on activities carried out by nonprofit organizations operating within the Israeli civil society, dealing with issues related to coexistence and to the protection and advancement of the civil and social rights of different populations, with special emphasis on the Arab-Palestinian population in Israel. These activities include educational and social services programs, community work and advocacy activities, aimed at creating dialogues and building coexistence among the different populations in the Israeli society and Palestine.
Summer Term
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7500 Social Policy and the LATINX Community
In this course on social policy and the Latinx immigrant community in the US, students will develop a broad understanding of how social policy at the local, state, and federal levels affect Latinx immigrants’ access to and interactions with social services. After developing a critical understanding of the diversity of the Latinx immigrant community and of the sociopolitical and –historical context for the development of social policies impacting this community, students will explore social policy and related social services around immigration, health, education, and labor that deeply affect the lived experiences of Latinx immigrants. Students will then investigate Latinx immigrants’ participation in the development of social policies as well as the ways in which Latinx grassroots movements and organizations influence national debates on public policy and social services for the Latinx immigrant community. Students will also learn about this group’s economic contributions to funding at local, state, and national levels to the U.S. social welfare system, as well as new and current initiatives promoting social policies geared towards social and economic justice for Latinx immigrants. Through course readings, lectures and discussions students will develop tools for critical thinking and analysis about how social services and the daily lived experiences of Latinx immigrants are mediated by policy and its implementation at local, state, and federal levels. Students will also develop skills in case study analysis through interactions and interviews with invited guests – local Latinx immigrant community members and social leaders – who will share their own perspectives, knowledge and firsthand experience around issues related to social policy and Latinx immigrants. Over the course of the semester, students will formulate plans for social policy advocating for social justice and human rights within the Latinx immigrant community.
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7510 Spirituality and Social Work Practice
Spirituality is a critical anchor of a holistic approach to social work, which views individuals, couples, families, groups, and communities in a bio-psycho-social-spiritual context. It varies in extent to which spiritual aspects of social work practice have been addressed explicitly in social work education. In a post September 11th, 2001 world, however, drawing from the wellsprings of spirituality seems more widespread, and even more crucial. Current trends in social work education, including the Council on Social Work Education's Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards support the inclusion of content on religious and spiritual diversity. Accordingly, this course is an advanced clinical practice elective that focuses on spiritual aspects of social work practice. The professional values of client self-determination and empowerment will be stressed as diverse spiritual perspectives are explored. This course will strive to seek a balance of exploring the universalistic as well as the particularistic in relationship to spirituality. Some particularistic religious and/or spiritual traditions will be studied as they exemplify commitments of spirituality and as they intersect with a more universalistic spirituality. The impacts of spiritual and religious systems in relation to diversity (e.g. by gender, social class, ethnicity, culture, and sexual orientation) will be considered. As a practice elective, this course will make linkages directly to students' practice experience in the field as well as to other curriculum areas such as human behavior theory, social policy, and research.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7530 Constructing America: A Socio-Legal History of Immigration
From the 1790 Act that restricted the right of naturalization to “free whites,” to the quota Acts of the 1920s that limited the entry of non-Nordic immigrants, to the reinvigorated restrictionism of the post-9/11 era, the laws of the nation and the discourses of immigration and immigrants that have enabled them have been key terrains in and through which legitimate and de-legitimized identities have been forged, and populations demarcated as viable participants in society or as undesirable Others to be excluded from full participation. Because immigration has been a central discriminating mechanism through which this selective peopling of the nation has been accomplished, the history of immigration and immigrants is a site par excellence for the examination of the mechanisms through which to examine contemporary issues of diversity, “difference,” and marginalization of populations. Social work’s development as a profession coincided with the period in U.S. history marked by the largest waves of immigration. The strategies the early U.S. social workers and social reformers devised to improve the poor and their communities were interventions located in and focused on immigrants and their neighborhoods. Work with poor immigrants in urban settings, shaped the nature and the direction of social work in these crucial early years of the profession. Moreover, in this work with the largely white immigrants—formulated and accomplished in the context of the rapidly developing social and physical sciences—social work cut its teeth, not only on the abiding issues of race, heredity, and culture, but on the still contested links between the individual and the environment. Examining the history of immigration—the history of the organic past which has constructed the particular demographic make-up of the present-day communities—is indispensable to understanding the profession’s current practices and future aspirations. This seminar will examine the socio-legal history of immigration. We will review major U.S. legislation concerning immigrants and immigration, refugees and asylum, and citizenship and naturalization. The legal codes, as well as the political and social discourses of identity that undergird and enabled those codes, will be analyzed through the lens of poststructuralist theories.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7540 Play Therapy
Play is the method children use to master and understand their worlds. When working with children and adolescents, social workers often utilize play as a primary treatment intervention. This course will provide students with a foundation in play therapy theories, techniques, and practice intervention models. Play therapy philosophies will be critically analyzed. Play therapy will be presented for application in a variety of practice settings as well as with individuals, families, and groups. Students will be taught how to apply play therapy to address issues such as trauma, loss, mood disturbance, relational stress, anxiety, and academic performance. Emphasis will be placed on approaching play therapy from perspectives of multicultural competence, empowerment, social justice, and inclusion.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7550 International Social Policy & Practice: Perspectives from the Global South
This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to social policy and practice perspectives from outside the U.S. and especially from communities in the Global South. The course will familiarize them with global professions and help prepare them for overseas/cross-cultural practice. Through the course students will identify numerous strategies and skills professionals have used to collaboratively build interventions within human rights, social policy, social welfare, education, healthcare and sustainable development arenas.
Fall
Also Offered As: MSSP 7550
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7560 Human Sexuality
The aim of this course is to increase students' ability to deal more comfortably with the sexual aspect of human functioning. Readings, written assignments, and classroom presentations are directed to realizing the diversity, complexity, and range of human sexual expression. Current information about sexuality from the biological and physiological sciences is reviewed to increase comfort and skill in discussion and handling of sex-related behavior, personal and societal attitudes will be explored. A variety of sex-related social problems encountered by social workers in family, education, health, and criminal justice settings are discussed. Diagnostic interviewing and treatment methods are presented in role play, group exercises and case studies.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7570 Loss through the Life Cycle
This course considers loss as a central theme throughout the life cycle. Content focuses on the physical, psychosocial, spiritual, and cultural aspects of loss, dying and bereavement processes and the interaction among individuals, families and professionals. Students examine historical trends of family, community, and institutional support for the terminally ill and those experiencing traumatic loss and learn ways to advocate for a system of services that supports full decision-making on the part of the client. Course materials, journals, and special projects identify how self and other factors impact service delivery to individuals, families, and communities experiencing loss, including ethical considerations prompted by cost, technology, and end of life issues.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7590 Substance Use Interventions
This course addresses intervention approaches used in social work practice with individuals, families, and groups who misuse addictive substances themselves or are affected by another's misuse. Students learn about addictive substances, models of intervention, how to engage and assess clients, and how to intervene and evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions. The course incorporates theory and research findings on various strategies of intervention.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7600 Mental Health Diagnostics
This course familiarizes students with mental health and mental disorders within the context of the life cycle, viewed from a biopsychosocial perspective. Prevalent categories of psychiatric disorders are considered with respect to their differentiating characteristics, explanatory theories, and relevance for social work practice, according to the DSM and other diagnostic tools. The course includes biological information and addresses the impact of race, ethnicity, social class, age, gender, and other sociocultural variables on diagnostic processes.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7620 Social Work Practice with Groups
Group work is an essential part of social work direct practice. Every social service agency utilizes groups, and social workers will engage with a variety of groups during the course of their careers. Given the fact that collective group processes are especially salient for marginalized communities, group work is essential to direct practice that is embedded in the principles of social justice. Moreover, group work has been shown to be a superior form of intervention for clients battling chronic conditions, entrenched behaviors and social stigma. In an era of evidence-based practice, successful and cost-effective group skills are a vital component of every social worker’s toolkit. Students will learn about different types of groups and modalities, facilitate groups in class and in field settings, and engage with social workers who have implemented group interventions in various communities in diverse contexts. The class will train students to facilitate therapeutic, psychoeducational, task, and decision groups, while helping them to explore how to start, manage and terminate groups in various social work settings.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7630 Global Human Rights & US Immigration: Implications for Policy & Practice
This course will begin with the history of migration to the US, as well as legal definitions of newcomers, including obtaining documents for lawful permanent residence, refugee status, as well as grounds for exclusion and deportation, and paths to naturalized citizenship. We will then review how a framework of cultural competence, and a strength or asset-based approach can inform service to immigrant clients. The core portion of the course will then focus first on the intersection of immigrants and health, mental health, employment, crimes, public entitlements, and public education. The course will conclude with family issues relevant to immigrant families: women, children, lesbian and gay, and elderly immigrants. Public policy issues will be integrated throughout, and the course will end with specific suggestions on systems change at various levels. By the end of the course students should be able to identify strategies for individual clients advocacy (micro); agency and community strategies (mezzo), and government advocacy (macro) to empower immigrant clients to become full community participants.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7650 Supervision and Leadership in Human Services Organizations
This course builds on social work knowledge, values, and skills gained in foundation practice courses and links them to the roles and functions of social workers as supervisors and managers in human service organizations. Course focus is on providing students with an overview of basic supervisory and human resource development concepts so they may be better prepared as professional social workers to enter agencies and provide direct reports (supervisees) with meaningful and appropriate direction, support, and motivation.
Not Offered Every Year
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7660 Enhancing Relationships: Interpersonal, Group and Organizational Transformation
SWRK 766 is for those seeking to increase their interpersonal, group, organizational, leadership and followership skills. It is assumed that participants will have the basics. Therefore the course is designed to uncover, explore and build new ways of understanding. This requires a set of logics that are readily available to us, but are rarely used. In SWRK 766 we will use three ways of thinking: the left-brain, digital, so-called "rational" logic; the right-brain, analogical, paradoxical logic; the links between our emotions and how we individually and collectively think and act. These forms of reasoning will help us recognize when a crisis is a genuine problem, as opposed to a decaying prelude to an emergent transformation. We will study people such as Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and Abraham Lincoln, ordinary folk who managed to create relationships at the interpersonal, group and organizational levels that were amazingly transformational. We will examine relationships that need to be reformed. And we will strive to develop enhanced relationship skills that can be applied in all of our endeavors. Members of all Penn graduate programs are welcome. SWRK 766 is designed for those: managing work groups; strengthening new ties with people from different walks of life; facilitating groups in reparative settings; dealing with societal disparities; conducting support groups; leading project groups; chairing committees; functioning as a classroom educator; serving on special task forces; addressing the pernicious societal isms; creating new enterprises; taking up leadership positions; building community resilience; advocating for those located in under-resourced enclaves; celebrating the many successful transformations constantly occurring; bringing latent possibility to life; or engaging in transformation that is sustainable and scalable.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7680 Social Policy Through Literature
Fiction provides a lens to look at social issues and social policy through the rich and understandable lives of human beings, their challenges, and their triumphs in the holistic context of their worlds. Through appreciation of the human condition as portrayed in literature, students learn to frame issues more precisely and present arguments in compelling and convincing ways, thus enhancing the capabilities of social workers, social policymakers, and other agents to influence policy change.
Also Offered As: MSSP 7680
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7690 Aging: The Intersection of Policy and Practice
This course examines a variety of social welfare policies that affect the rights and interests of older adults. These include policies related to economic security, health, long term care, and civil rights. In addition, the course reviews the policy-making process with a discussion of the influence of legislative sanctions and case law in establishing aging policy in the U.S. The focus of the course is on critical analysis of the key assumptions driving policy and policy change, e.g. social responsibility vs. individual responsibility. Finally, the course includes a critical examination of the intersection between policy and practice, that is, the influence that policy has on the design of interventions and service delivery practices at the state and local level and the impact of changing policies on communities, providers, and older adults.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7720 Postcolonial Social Work Practice: International Social Welfare in India
In this course, students examine the global welfare system and its engagement with severely marginalized communities. This six-week course centers around a 700,000-strong sex workers' collaborative based in Sonagachi, Kolkata, India, one of Asia's largest red-light districts. Collaborative engagement with the collective and its grassroots movement is combined with research projects and class discussions (in open classrooms that at times include community members, as well as feminist and queer theory scholars from Indian Universities ) in which students engage with texts on HIV, sex work, feminist postcolonial theory and international social work. The class counts for the Human Rights Certificate, as well as macro, direct practice, and NPL electives. As of this year, this course is also part of a campus-wide group of classes that has been put together by faculty involved in #PoliceFreePenn, that thoughtfully and intentionally foregrounds police state abolition.
Summer Term
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7730 Mental Health Challenges in Childhood and Adolescence
This course will be an opportunity for the student and the instructor to explore the concept "psychopathology" as it has been and is applied to childhood and adolescence. There are some psychopathological challenges that are unique to childhood and some which can manifest themselves throughout childhood into adolescence and adulthood. The social worker/practitioner will encounter a wide range of symptomatic presentations among his/her clients. At this time in the fields of clinical social work, psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy there are numerous frameworks available to the practitioner to aid in an understanding of symptoms in children and adolescents. During the next several weeks three conceptual frameworks will be articulated. These three frameworks will elucidate the possible meaning, origin, and/or function of the symptoms and offer to the student a vocabulary with which to engage the situation. At the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century, psychoanalysis emerged in Europe as a method of understanding symptoms from the point of view of internal conflict within the child or adolescent. After World War II in the U.S.A., a model of understanding symptoms from a systemic/cybernetic point of view revolutionized the diagnostic processes involved in working with children and adolescents. Since the late 1980's, postmodern ideas, primarily from Europe and Australia, have greatly influenced and informed the understanding of psychopathology in children and adolescents. Narrative, social constructivist, and linguistic usage patterns have become a common vocabulary in the discourse on psychopathology. This course is not intended to be a reading of the history of child psychopathology. It is intended to expose the student to the most influential paradigms in the field of child psychopathology.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7740 Program Evaluation
This course introduces students to theoretical and practical aspects of social service program evaluation. Students learn about the design and implementation of all phases of an evaluation, from needs assessment to analysis of findings. Skills such as survey construction and budgeting are introduced. Intensive analysis of existing studies illustrates how evaluations are designed and how findings affect social programs and policy.
Fall or Spring
Prerequisite: SWRK 6150
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7770 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is the world’s most effective and empirically-based psychotherapy with strong scientific evidence. CBT is a collaborative and empowering psychotherapy that educates and helps clients to motivate themselves, set goals, and develop and implement treatment plans to reach those goals. The purpose of this advanced clinical skills course is to orient students to CBT, to begin applying the basic principles of CBT, and to develop a foundational skill-set in CBT approaches and techniques.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
Prerequisite: SWRK 6010 AND SWRK 6020 AND SWRK 6030 AND SWRK 6040 AND SWRK 6140 AND SWRK 6150
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7780 Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
In this course we will examine the underlying theories, empirical foundations, and fundamental skill sets associated with dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT). Students will be expected to participate in role plays, lead mindfulness exercises, and carry out chain analyses.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7810 Qualitative Research in Social Work
Qualitative research encompasses a variety of methods that enable the researcher to enter into the "lived experience" of research participants. These methods are particularly sensitive to the voices of populations whose perspectives are silenced by dominant societal discourses. The course begins by giving attention to underlying philosophical issues and traditions of qualitative research and proceeds to examine qualitative research design, methods of data collection, strategies to ensure rigor, data analysis, and presentation of findings. Students will learn about research interviewing, focus groups, and participant observation and ways in which qualitative research can be used to inform and evaluate social work practice and programs. Students will have the opportunity to apply qualitative research methods to in-class activities and individual or group projects.
Fall
Prerequisite: SWRK 6150
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7820 Global Drug Policy
International drug policy is guided by three international conventions, which inform the implementation of national drug control efforts. This framework supports the “war on drugs” approach, the intention of which is to eliminate the production, sale, and consumption of all illicit drugs. After more than a half-century, not only has this deeply flawed approach failed to accomplish its goals, it is one reason that global use and production are at an all-time high. In this course, students will examine lessons learned in drug policy and explore innovative options put into place by a number of states and local governments. Moreover, students will be exposed to a spectrum of topics within the field of drug policy such as development, public health, gender-based issues, human rights, and criminal justice. Throughout the course we will explore some of the larger drug policy questions including: which drugs are illegal and why? what drives and/or impedes drugs regulation? what has been the impact of 50+ years of the so-called "war on drugs"? what are the prospects for, decriminalization and/or legalization? what are the unintended consequences and which populations are impacted by these? Literacy across a full range of drug policy areas will be developed for those who may wish to delve into this topic further, either academically or professionally. Finally, students will be provided opportunities for applied learning. We will review and write grant proposals and experiment with advocacy tools (public speaking, preparing for a press conference, etc.). These skills will capacitate students for future practical policy engagement in this issue area and others.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7830 Advanced Mental Health Practice with U.S. Veterans
Although this course is open to all students, it is designed for students in the clinical concentration and is required for students in the Cohen Veterans Network Scholars program. The course will focus on clinical knowledge and evidence-based practice skills for common mental health problems in veteran settings. The course will introduce students to the assessment and treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Depression and Anxiety Disorders, Substance Abuse, Military Sexual Trauma (MST) and Suicide Assessment and Management among veteran populations. Other topics may include cultural competency, homelessness, and combat stress disorders. Since this is a seminar course, some classes will be taught by social workers/psychologists from the Veterans Hospital in Philadelphia and the Cohen Veterans Outpatient Clinic.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7850 Criminal Justice Policies: Implications for Social Work
The United States prison population has risen more than three hundred percent in the last three decades. More people are currently incarcerated than at any other point in the history of the United States, and that of the world. This unprecedented period of incarceration has gone largely invisible although it represents one of the greatest social epidemics in the history of the United States. This course provides a critical analysis of the criminal justice system in the United States from a historical and contemporary perspective. It examines the implications of significant criminal justice policies such as the Rockefeller Drug Laws, 3-Strike Legislations, and Mandatory Minimums on the current state of incarceration, and the phenomenon of "Reentry" and "Recidivism". The intersections of criminal justice and social work practice are unmistakable when examining staples of social work practice such as homelessness, mental health and substance abuse, thus the course is intended to facilitate a more informed/holistic practice for all social work students.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7860 Addressing Trauma in Practice
This course integrates trauma theory and practice and expands practice knowledge to include the treatment and assessment of the survivors of trauma. Emphasis is placed on differentiating PTSD from Complex Trauma in order to identify appropriate, evidence-based intervention strategies. Topics covered in the course include an historical overview of the development of our understanding of trauma and the exploration of various types of trauma including war trauma, domestic violence, childhood sexual and physical abuse, natural disasters, the experiences of political refugees and organizational trauma. Among the interventions covered in this course are CBT, EMDR, group and psychodynamic treatment. Students will consider issues that affect those treating the survivors of trauma, such as vicarious trauma, and will explore approaches to self-care. This is an advanced clinical course. Through assignments and class discussions, students are encouraged to use their experiences in the field to deepen their understanding of the material covered in the course.
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7870 Leadership Theory and Practice
This course will present the evolution of leadership theory beginning with classical trait theories and ultimately focusing on more modern perspectives such as adaptive, authentic, and shared leadership models that engage more critical understandings of traditional leadership theory. Ultimately, we frame leadership as socially constructed, collective experience that is generated by complex group dynamics. We will examine leadership in nonprofit organizations, government, and social movements. Readings will include a formal overview of leadership theory as well as contemporary feminist and futurist perspectives. The practice focus in on developing new relational capabilities that include deep listening, self-reflection, and adaptive problem solving. “There is nothing so practical as good theory” – Kurt Lewin, Organizational Psychologist “All models are wrong, but some are useful” – George Box, Statistician “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them, this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” – Ursala K. Le Guin
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7880 Harm Reduction on the Borders: Substance Use and HIV Treatment in Puerto Rico
This course examines the U.S.-based substance use and HIV treatment systems, and its engagement with injection drug users in Fajardo, Puerto Rico. It is designed to provide the students with an understanding of the political economy of harm reduction initiatives, and the manner in which it is shaped by the complicated relationship between Puerto Rico and the U.S. Students are expected to gain an understanding of Puerto Rico's welfare environment, the role of social welfare and social workers in such a context, and the interweaving of social control and social change embedded in welfare initiatives in "borderlands" such as Fajardo. During the four-week course in Fajardo, students will complete a placement in a needle exchange program, and engage with texts on HIV, substance use, postcolonial theory and international social work.
Summer Term
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7910 Internal Family Systems
This course offers in-depth study of basic theory, techniques and clinical applications of the Internal Family System’s (IFS) model of care. Together we will explore the foundational skills of the model and how to use it to support growth and healing in diverse client population and communities. This highly experiential course will emphasize mastery of the concepts as well as application of these concepts with clients. Students will be prepared to use core aspects of this model with clients in brief and long-term treatment, group settings and community interventions. This class will meet virtually 10 times and will have two 5-hour, in-person Saturday class commitments. Please join this class only if you can attend both Saturday classes. In this course students will: 1) Develop an understanding of the concept of multiplicity of mind, interpersonal neurobiology and impact of family systems on individuals 2) Learn conceptual framework of the IFS model; 3) Use this model to explore aspects of their clients and one’s own internal family system; 4) Recognizing which parts become triggered when working with different clients; 5) Assess and develop treatment strategies for their clients using the IFS model; and 6) Locate this model within the framework of anti-oppressive social work practices
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7920 Psychodynamic Theory
The purpose of this course is to review the evolution of psychodynamic theory and consider key concepts in psychoanalysis, ego psychology, object relations theory, self-psychology, attachment theory, relational and intersubjective theories and current findings in cognitive neuroscience. Participants will explore human psychological functioning as explained by these various psychodynamic theories and through the biopsychosocial lens that informs social work practice. Students will examine how external factors such as race, class, gender, culture and biology are interwoven with often unconscious, internal psychological determinants, creating the complexities of human behavior that challenge us in our clinical work. Case presentations by students, the instructor and guest lecturers will demonstrate how concepts from psychodynamic theory can be applied to social work practice with diverse clients in varied settings.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7940 Practice with Older Adults and Families
This course focuses on practice with older adults and families within a life course and resiliency perspective. It examines the nature of the aging process, needs and life issues, the ways in which persons adapt to changes, and the ways in which interventions may assist with these adaptations. Students learn assessment, case management, and intervention skills, including the use of rapid assessment and diagnostic tools, needed to work effectively with older populations and family caregivers in a variety of community-based and institutional settings. The course emphasizes evidence-based practices that enhance quality of life, dignity, respect for differences, and maximum independent functioning.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7950 Clinical Foundations in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy
Though psychedelic plants and compounds have been used in a wide-spectrum of healing practices of most cultures throughout human history, they have quickly been gaining recognition and acceptance in conventional western healthcare in recent years, along with a growing popularity of underground and international ceremonial plant medicine work. Both psilocybin and MDMA have received a “Breakthrough Therapy” designation from the FDA, with the potential for MDMA to be rescheduled in the next twelve months. Additionally, the prevalence of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy practices and increased access to these medicines overall make it important for the next generation of clinicians to be familiar with psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) practices. Even if clinical social workers are not planning to center PAT in their practice, it is highly likely that they will be working with people who may come to them needing to integrate expansive experiences or may want to discuss the use of PAT as a supplement to their therapeutic work. This course offers an in-depth overview of psychedelic-assisted therapy protocols and ethical considerations in clinical practice. We will begin the course with a brief overview of the history of psychedelics and include discussions of salient topics in the psychedelic justice movement regarding accessibility and cultural appropriation throughout the course. Additionally, on the last day of class, students will be offered the opportunity to participate in a music journey experience without the use of psychedelics (those students who would prefer not to participate, can observe). After an initial 2-hr online preparation session, this course is being taught in 8hr increments (including an hour for lunch) over four Saturdays and one Sunday.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7960 Family Economic Mobility: Problems and Policies
The experiences and voices of mothers, fathers, children, employers, children's teachers, human service workers, job training providers, policymakers and others in cities across America graphically show us the "real life" challenges to economic mobility facing today's families and organizations. These voices particularly illustrate how economic, social, and cultural policies, practices, and beliefs intersect to perpetuate economic inequality for low-income and many middle-income working families alike. The labor market, welfare and workforce programs, public schools and government are some of the institutions implicated in this intersection. In the course we deconstruct concepts such as the "work ethic," "family-friendly workplace," and "good jobs" in terms of economic, racial and cultural inequalities and, more broadly, in terms of their meaning, aims and rhetoric. At base, this course examines occupational mobility in America within the broad framework of capitalism, democracy, race, ethnicity and gender. Students from GSE, SAS, City Planning, and Communications often join SP2 students to read and critique classic and contemporary literature from multiple disciplines and explore generative roles for "meso-oriented" social change professionals.
Fall or Spring
Also Offered As: MSSP 7960
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7970 Education Law & Policy Seminar
The Home and School Visitor (HSV) Education Law & Policy Seminar meets the requirement for the HSV Certificate, addresses public education laws and policies, considers how poverty and racism influence public education, and provides a macro perspective to understand the role of the social worker in schools. The course is divided into five modules through January and February of the Spring semester. The course content will enhance your understanding of our system of public education and the role that social workers can play in helping it to uphold its mandate of providing a quality education for all students.
Spring
0 Course Units
SWRK 7980 Advanced Topics
Titles and Topics vary. See department website for descriptions: https://www.sp2.upenn.edu/academics/master-of-social-work/academics/course-desc riptions/
Fall or Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 7990 Independent Study
Independent studies provide a flexible opportunity for standing faculty and students to work together in pursuing a topic of special interest that is not sufficiently covered by other courses in the curriculum. The content of independent studies is highly specialized and, as such, requires a plan of study developed jointly by the student(s) and the supervising standing faculty member. Part-time faculty members are not eligible to offer independent studies.
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9010 Proseminar
This course is a weekly, 90-minute (.5 course unit) proseminar. The course contains two main components: a research seminar (i.e., faculty and student presentations of their in-progress research) and skills training (e.g., how to write an abstract, software demonstrations). The two are interwoven throughout the academic year (e.g., 2 weeks of the month devoted to the research seminar and 2 weeks of the month devoted to skills training). The proseminar is required of all students until they successfully defend their dissertation proposal.
Fall or Spring
0.5 Course Units
SWRK 9100 Quantitative Research Methods
The purpose of this course is to teach the basics of practice research, with an emphasis on intervention research. This course will focus on research ethics, building a conceptual framework, source credibility, question and hypothesis formulation, design, sampling, measurement, and scale construction and selection. Special emphasis will be placed on the development of designing feasible and practical research studies to answer questions of importance to social work practice. The course will emphasize the selection and development of outcome measures, intervention manuals, and fidelity measures. It will closely examine the use and development of practice guidelines, evidence-based practice and meta-analytic procedures. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9120 Qualitative Research Methods
This course will cover the essentials of qualitative research. Students will learn how to "situate themselves" in the research process so as to best capture the lived experience of the subjects under investigation. The course will explore the appropriate use of intensive interviews, grounded theory and ethnography. Mixed methods that employ both qualitative and quantitative approaches, will also be covered. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Spring
Prerequisite: SWRK 9100
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9130 Clinical Theory I
The purpose of this course is to broaden and deepen participants' mastery of several theories of development, personality, and behavior that have contributed to social work's knowledge base across the decades and continue to inform clinical social work epistemology today. Drawing primarily from original sources, we will consider key assumptions, constructs, and propositions of each theory in terms of its congruence with social work's principles, values, and mission and in relation to the profession's person-in-environment perspective. In this first semester, we will study the evolution of theories central to psychodynamic thought, from Freud's early biological model of the mind, through various relational perspectives, to contemporary work in the fields of attachment and interpersonal neurobiology. This examination will constitute a case study of the manner in which theories are socially constructed and will lay the foundation for critical inquiry into the social and political biases inherent in the Western European intellectual tradition from which most theories of human behavior have emerged. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9140 Clinical Theory II
The purpose of Clinical Theory II is two-fold: to broaden and deepen students' mastery of theories of behavior and cognition and to develop understanding of psychotherapy integration. We will begin by establishing a clear rationale for the two-fold nature of the course. Then, we will review the history and fundamentals of behavioral theory, and its iterations, to ground students firmly in a tradition that emphasizes empirical research. Students will have opportunities to expand their knowledge base of these theories through application to clinical practice with case conceptualizations and choice of focus in assignments. This process will involve critically examining the empirical support and indications for the use of various cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) approaches, including culturally adapted CBT. We will consider key assumptions, constructs, and propositions of behavioral and cognitive theories from the lens of social work's principles, values, and mission with oppressed and marginalized people. Finally, we will focus on psychotherapy integration approaches which involve the flexible application of various theories and techniques for a diverse range of people and concerns based on the strengths and needs of each client. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Spring
Prerequisite: SWRK 9130
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9150 Dissertation Seminar
This seminar is designed to prepare participants for dissertation proposal writing and defense. Each component of this workshop moves the student closer to the two culminating assignments: a concisely crafted and well-supported 15-25 page written draft of the dissertation proposal and a presentation of the proposal with accompanying PowerPoint. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9170 Applied Statistics
This course is designed to provide students with a range of statistical methods and applications used for research in human services and clinical practice settings. Topics covered include types of measurement and variables, and basic concepts and techniques for exploring and categorizing data, for generalizing data from sample to population and tests of significance. An emphasis will be placed on the practical applications of data to address social work practice issues. Students will learn how to choose and apply statistical tools to data sources, when and how statistical tools can be used to analyze data, and how to interpret others' quantitative studies. Students will gain hands-on experience in using windows-based statistical software to manage and analyze quantitative data. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9180 The Trauma Spectrum and Its Treatment: The PRISM Meta-Model
Research findings document that trauma is a ubiquitous human experience with many types and variations. It is often a highly personalized exposure or experience (individual, group, and collective) that has a wide range of pycho-social and neuro-physiological consequences. Both the types of trauma and types of response make up the trauma spectrum. This course will introduce this spectrum and contemporary trauma theory and findings. Due to the large number of traumatized individuals who seek services for current and past symptoms, social workers and other mental health (and medical) professionals can expect to treat a variety of traumatized clients over the course of their careers. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9190 Teaching Social Work
This class will focus on classroom dynamics, class culture and instructor skills using an organismic model in which the class has a life of its own and is capable of growth and development. In addition, students will learn underlying theories, research, practice wisdom, etc. that we need to communicate to our students. The course should be helpful in thinking about issues that are central to effective teaching regardless of the practice models you present to your students or the content of courses including policy, research, etc. Students will have an opportunity to share their current or past teaching with a particular emphasis on those difficult moments when they had second thought about classroom teaching as a career. Examples will be used to help illustrate the theoretical content and the readings and bring the ideas to life as they address the real day-to-day issues we all face in teaching. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Fall
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9200 Advanced Topics in Social Work Practice
Topics vary. The second and final year of DSW coursework culminates in two electives selected by the student cohort completed as a group. Previous topics include: Neurophysiology of Trauma, Substance Use Interventions, Introduction to Sex Therapy, Clinical Practice with Adolescents and Young Adults, Ethics in Mental Health Care, Trauma Informed Supervision and Leadership for Change. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Spring
0.25-1 Course Unit
SWRK 9210 Culture, Race, and Identity
White supremacy and institutional racism are deep and pervasive parts of the American experience. They influence the daily experience of Black/African American people and other persons of color. Encounters with institutional oppression based in ideas about race are a defining element of social work practice. Racial profiling, inequity in access to health care, and segregation in housing, education, and work are the realities faced by people of color with whom social workers interact. This course explores the complexities of racism in America: the construction of racial and ethnic categories, the impact of racism and discrimination on identity, individuals and social institutions, and the influence of ideology and oppressive policies and practices on social welfare systems and their clients. The relationship between Blacks/African Americans and Americans of European descent provides a commonly understood history and social experience from which to analyze the experiences of oppression based on ascribed or inherent characteristics. We will discuss the assigned scholarship, and consider the congruence of the policies and practices with the ethics and values of clinical social work, and the social work profession more broadly. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Spring
0.25-1 Course Unit
SWRK 9220 Family Based Interventions
This course reviews contemporary theories of Couples and Family Therapy within a historical perspective. Family approaches reviewed include systemic, structural, experiential, attachment-based, narrative, and psycho-educational models. Couples models include the Gottman Method, Emotionally-Focused Couples Work, Imago, and Cognitive Behavioral Work. Case studies, films, and critical discussions will be used to deepen students’ understanding of different models. The course will also include an understanding of economic constraints, cultural differences, sexual orientation, and larger systemic influences. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9230 Social Construction and Social Work Practice: Transforming Dialogues
This course will focus on the application of a social constructionist orientation to social work practice with an emphasis on its transforming potential. A primary objective of this course is to encourage you to reflect on and critically analyze traditional and contemporary issues germane to social work by using social constructionist ideas to explore how assumptions and dominant understandings of these issues are connected to policies and practices and the possibilities for transformative change. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Spring
0.5 Course Units
SWRK 9240 Leadership
This course will present the evolution of leadership theory beginning with classical trait theories and ultimately focusing on more modern perspectives such as adaptive, authentic, and shared leadership models that engage more critical understanding of traditional leadership theory. Ultimately, we frame leadership as a social-constructed, collective experience that is generated by complex group dynamics. We will examine leadership in non-profit organizations, government, and social movements. Readings will include a formal overview of leadership theory as well as contemporary feminist and futurist perspectives. The practice focus is on developing new relational capabilities that include deep listening, self-reflection, and adaptive problem interpretation. Course is restricted to Doctorate in Clinical Social Work (DSW) students.
Spring
0.5 Course Units
SWRK 9250 Supervision
Supervision is foundational to social work practice. It is a source of education and support in the profession’s practice as well as during the pursuit of the BSW/MSW degree and clinical licensure. While the profession holds up supervision as an essential component of ethical and effective practice, there is little provided by way of training or education of clinical supervision on social work practice. This course will explore the structure, practice and barriers to providing supervision in an agency/organizational setting. The course material explores the changing context of supervision in the social work field, highlights supervision as a means to teach clinical material, support supervisees impacted by organizational dynamics, and spotlight strategies for managing compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, and burnout in the context of social work practice. This course will invite you to think about the role of clinical supervision in your career and your own style and model preference.
Spring
1 Course Unit
SWRK 9900 DSW Dissertation
All students on dissertation status are registered for year-long dissertation status courses. These courses will receive a temporary mark of PR in the fall to indicate the course is in progress and a permanent mark of S (satisfactory progress) or U (unsatisfactory) at the end of the spring semester (or fall semester if that is the student’s last enrolled term). The mark will be a reflection of the evaluation of the student’s progress based, in part, on the student’s Annual Progress Report.
Fall, Spring, and Summer Terms
0 Course Units
SWRK 9950 Doctoral Dissertation
Doctoral Dissertation
0 Course Units