Social Work Then and Now
Purpose: Introduce students to the social work profession’s history, to the National Association of Social Work (NASW) and the profession’s commitment to advancing human rights and social and economic justice. Identify and make sense of multiple sources of knowledge in a social work context.
Assignment: Students are to write a Compare and Contrast academic paper. Social workers must identify and make sense of multiple sources of knowledge and draw conclusions daily. This assignment requires students to do just this. Students will be accessing and understanding both historical and contemporary (current) documentation about the social work profession.
Students are to produce an academic paper describing students learned regarding the past – the historical roots of social work– and the present social work profession. Students are to use the electronic resources listed below. The assignment requires both critical thinking and writing skills.
Students will be expected to discuss in class about what they learned and focused their paper on, as part of a class discussion.
Writing prompts for assignment: How are the Settlement and Charity Organizations movements similar and different? How does the National Association of Social Workers represent the best of both movements?
What Writing Prompts are: Writing Prompts are used to assist writers in both narrowing down (synthesize) information as well as understanding the material in order to formulate a thesis statement (the point of the paper). Prompts assist writers in the development of the ideas to be communicated in the paper. They are used in the prewriting stage in a paper’s development. (In addition, it is an excellent way to break through writer’s block.)
What Writing Prompts are not: Writing Prompts do not dictate the organization (or outline) of the paper to be written.
