SWTP236 - Social Work and Community Practice

Year

Credit points

Campus offering

Prerequisites

SWTP321 Field Education in Social Work 2

Teaching organisation

Unit rationale, description and aim

Social workers are required to understand and respond to the interface between people and their social, cultural and physical environments. Social workers also respond to human needs in the context of socio-political and environmental factors. This unit introduces students to community development work as a method of social work practice. This unit focuses on developing knowledge and skills for practice with communities. The unit requires students to develop beginning level capacities to identify, analyse and critically evaluate the role of social work in professional practice with communities in Australia and internationally, with particular reference to community development. Through critical examination of a range of community projects, campaigns and initiatives, students will identify, and appraise a range of theoretical underpinnings, methodological approaches, and ethical and values issues involved in social work with communities. Ethical issues in community work and particular themes for diverse populations, including rural communities, indigenous populations, culturally and linguistically diverse groups, and international communities, will be explored. This aim of this unit is to provide students with knowledge and skills in community work, an essential area of social work intervention and the profession's commitment to wellbeing and social justice, including community engagement activities that the opportunity to participate in a community project to put their theory and skills into action.

Learning outcomes

To successfully complete this unit you will be able to demonstrate you have achieved the learning outcomes (LO) detailed in the below table.

Each outcome is informed by a number of graduate capabilities (GC) to ensure your work in this, and every unit, is part of a larger goal of graduating from ACU with the attributes of insight, empathy, imagination and impact.

Explore the graduate capabilities.

On successful completion of this unit, students should be able to:

LO1 - Analyse the roles of social workers in and with communities in a variety of community contexts (GA4,GA5); 

LO2 - Propose strategies to work with communities to identify strengths, diversity and build social capital in response to local needs (GA5, GA6); 

LO3 - Propose engagement strategies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and communities and organisations (GA2, GA5, GA7); 

LO4 - Identify and respond to personal values and ideologies and ethical issues in community practice (GA3) ;

LO5 - Engage with community organisations to plan and evaluate community interventions utilising  appropriate theories and models of community work practice (GA4, GA5, GA8). 

Graduate attributes

GA1 - demonstrate respect for the dignity of each individual and for human diversity 

GA2 - recognise their responsibility to the common good, the environment and society 

GA3 - apply ethical perspectives in informed decision making

GA4 - think critically and reflectively 

GA5 - demonstrate values, knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to the discipline and/or profession 

GA6 - solve problems in a variety of settings taking local and international perspectives into account

GA7 - work both autonomously and collaboratively 

GA8 - locate, organise, analyse, synthesise and evaluate information 

AASW Practice Standards 

This unit has been mapped to the ACU Graduate Attributes, AASW Graduate Attributes and the AASW PracticeStandards. The following table sets out the broad relationship between the Learning Outcomes, ACU Graduate Attributes, AASW Graduate Attributes and the AASW Practice Standards

Content

Topics will include:

The Concept of Community

• The relationship between community work and social work
• Ethical issues in community work
• Differences between 
• community development
• social development
• social action
• community organization

Contextualising Community

• Historical development of community work
• State intervention and the community
• Community as arena for social policy

Social Action

• Radicalism and community work
• Activism and the labour movement
• Social movements and building alliances (Australian and overseas examples)
• Activism and the social justice movement and the role of social media

Social Development

• Integrated development
• Concept of social planning
• International development
• Aid programs and developments
• Role of agencies
• World Bank
• Civil Society in Development

Community Organising

• Understanding community organisations
• Legitimacy
• Accountability
• Representativeness
• Engaging with a community
• Participation and power
• Identifying inequality and discrimination in communities
• Strategies for working together
• Collaboration or competition

Community Development in and with Diverse Communities

• Local communities
• urban
• rural
• International communities
• Working with culturally and linguistically diverse communities
• Social work practice with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
• Concept of community work in these contexts
• Understanding the community and self as practitioner

Doing Community Work

• Capacity Building
• Asset-Based Community (ABCD approach)
• Needs and Wants
• Doing a community profile

Community Development Roles and Skills in Social Work

Strategies:

• using the media
• lobbying
• funding

Evaluation in Social Work with Communities

• Program planning
• Evaluation in community organisations

Learning and teaching strategy and rationale

This unit involves a combination of face-to-face lectures, small group tutorials and LEO. The unit entails engagement with human service and community organisations.

Tutorials will incorporate small group, collaborative learning with students engaging in active discussion of the theoretical unit content of community development, community capacity building, and asset-mapping of local communities. Virtual review of best practice community development initiatives will be utilised allowing students to better understand and explore good practice responses in building resilience and successful community development initiatives. 

Students’ learning experience will significantly impact on their capacity in identifying good practice approaches, reviewing community issues and identifying their relevance to building competency and knowledge in community development. 

Assessment strategy and rationale

The assessment strategy is to align assessments very closely to the learning outcomes. It aims to prepare students to develop academic skills through reflection, review and analysis of good practice community development approaches and working in small groups to reveal good practice community development approaches in group presentation. 

The first two assessments comprise a reflective journal and group project presentation. These tasks assess students’ capacity to identify and reflect on good practice approaches in the field of community development. These directly relate to (LO2) examining strategies to work with communities to identify strengths, diversity and build social capital in response to local needs in the curricula. These assignments are authentic and adopt reflexive approaches key to social work with communities. 

The third assessment directly assesses the ability of students to theorise about communities and ways to engage and work with communities. This assessment gives students an opportunity to articulate the importance of working with communities (LO5). Evidence of demonstrable competency and knowledge within these unit assessment tasks sets students on a successful path towards demonstrating sound understanding of and commitment to human needs in communities and exploration of good practice in capacity building with vulnerable communities. 

Overview of assessments

Representative texts and references

Connolly, M., & Harms, L. (2013). Social work: Contexts and practice (3rd ed.). Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

Bennett, B., Green, S., Gilbert, S., & Bessarab, D. (Eds.). (2013). Our voices: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social work. Melbourne: Palgrave MacMillan

Defilippis, J., & Saegert, S. (2012). The community development reader. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ife, J. (2010). Human rights from below: Achieving human rights through community development (3rd ed.). Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press.

Kenny, S. (2011). Developing communities for the future (4th ed.). Melbourne, Australia: Thomson.

O'Hara, A., & Pockett, R. (Eds.). (2011). Skills for human service practice (2nd ed). Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

Pawar, M. (2010). Community development in Asia and the Pacific. New York: Routledge.

Soni, S. (2011). Working with diversity in youth and community work. Exeter: Learning Matters.