NGO Education Survey

Changing Communities: Tensions and Possibilities for Citizenship and Social Justice

This course considers how contemporary social, political and economic changes shape constraints and possibilities for enhancing social justice through grassroots organizing, (self-)advocacy, alliance-building, and community based research. The course examines theories and practices of community and citizenship in Canada and how notions of togetherness, common interests, active citizenship and rights and responsibilities are constituted, enacted, practiced and challenged in the community.

Changing Social Service Organizations: Tensions in Practice (726)

The course examines the changing forms and discourses of social service organizations and their management. Central to the course focus is critical analysis of the constraints and possibilities of fashioning practices and policies in the interests of service users and communities.

Changing Social Services, Changing Communities: Focus on Leadership

This course considers themes of audit and accountability mechanisms, risk management, performance measures, governance and funding arrangements, and the regulation of advocacy, in relation to social service and community leadership. Explores how broad contextual forces, particularly the rise of managerialism and the importing of business models into public service delivery and community-based initiatives, shape organizational cultures and practices of management and supervision. Identifies and explores the impacts, tensions and dilemmas generated by these organizing forces for leaders who have commitments to care and justice, and considers ways to build ethical reflexivity into leadership practice.

Community Citizenship and Social Justice (721)

This course examines contemporary theories and practices of community and citizenship in Canada. Rather than assuming a consensual and universal model of collectivity , we explore how notions of togetherness, common interests, active citizenship and rights and responsibilities are constituted, enacted, practiced and challenged in the community, and how social workers could effect social justice through grassroots organizing, advocacy and community based research.

Critical Approaches to Evidence and Evaluation in Social Services & Communities

Discourses of evidence-based practice increasingly permeate social services, and audit technologies abound. This course explores discourses of research and accountability as they relate to practice in social services and communities. It also prepares students to conduct critical evaluation a variety of settings. It supports students to examine the evaluation practices of a particular social service or community setting: to apply conceptual frameworks about evidence and accountability to the reporting requirements the agency engages and to the measures used to define success; and, drawing on literature in the field, to propose justice-focused improvements or alternatives.

Leadership Practicum

Each student will have a leadership practicum in a social service agency or community organization. Students will take on a leadership project - for example, lead the development of a new policy, move a service initiative forward, or explore and provide recommendations about how a community need might be better met. Field instruction will be provided by a social worker who holds an MSW degree. Students’ experiences, observations and actions in the practicum setting will become topics for reflection in the accompanying seminar . The practicum will be 450 hours long (this number of hours is required for accreditation by the Canadian Association for Social Work Education).

Organizational and Social Change: Theories, Practices and Possibilities for Leadership

This course draws on justice-oriented (feminist, Indigenous, post-heroic etc) approaches to analyzing and facilitating change in social services and communities. Considers possibilities and strategies for challenging and resisting oppressive structural arrangements, for using opportunities to promote the interests of service users and marginalized communities, for working toward equitable organizational practices, and for improving working environments. Course themes include justice-oriented governance; practices for building humane organizational cultures (including supervision practices, and practices that welcome diversity and difference); communications (internal and external, including technology and social media, and questions of influence and persuasion); collaborations across agencies and sectors; policy frameworks and processes (including relations with government).

Research for Social Change

This course addresses the complexities of formulating and carrying out research explicitly designed to be part of social change processes. It explores how social research may be engaged when issues of inequality and marginalization are embedded in the research content and process.

Social Work and Social Justice: Theoretical Tensions

This course addresses the fundamental tension in social work’s location within social programs and state practices that have the potential both to redress and to deepen social inequalities. Theoretical and practical dimensions of this tension are explored in the contemporary context in which social programs in the public and voluntary sectors are the focus of neo-liberal restructuring and of the struggles and claims of marginalized populations.