Class Descriptions

Children and Youth Services and Social Policies

SW633

Credits:	3
Prerequisites:	SW 530
Faculty Approval Date:	09/03/2014

Course Description

This course will critically analyze the various social services and policies that provide developmental, preventive, treatment, and rehabilitative services aimed at children and youth and their families. The role of social services in the broad context of both formal and informal systems that influence the life course of children and youth will be addressed. This course will examine how services are articulated at various levels of intervention and in policies and regulations and how this affects the ethical practice of social workers and other family and child serving professionals. Particular emphasis will be placed on services provided by community-based agencies, child welfare services, and the juvenile justice system. Students will develop critical frameworks for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the policies and organization and delivery of child-oriented social services based on behavioral and social science research and through the lens of multi-culturalism and social justice values. In addition, illustrative cross-national comparisons of services and policies for families with children and youth will be examined. The course will address the key diversity dimensions "ability, age, class, color, culture, ethnicity, family structure, gender (including gender identity and gender expression), marital status, national origin, race, religion or spirituality, sex, and sexual orientation."

Objectives

Upon completion of the course

1. Students should be able to demonstrate knowledge of the policies that govern services to Children & Youth and their Families in Society in the following areas:
a. Specify and critique the philosophies and ideologies that guide the development of policy instruments and service arrangements for children, youth and their families
b. Specify and critique how the current policy frameworks (at the federal, state, and local levels) reflect society's social construction of the child, youth and family (e.g. do not take into account variant family/caretaking forms and structures)
c. Specify and critique the laws, regulations and judicial interpretations that govern the delivery of social services to children, youth, and families
d. Specify and critique the outcomes and implications of current policies for children, youth, and families
e. Specify and critique the funding mechanisms that are available to provide services to children, youth, and families
f. Demonstrate understanding of how the structure and historical development of policies maintain systems of power, privilege and oppression
g. Develop the ability to identify how inequitable power is manifested on various dimensions of children, youth, and their families and how these dimensions interact with each other.
h. Show an understanding and the ability to critique how current policy frameworks work to promote social justice or oppression.
i. Demonstrate critical analysis using cross national comparisons
(Practice Behaviors 5.IP, 5.SPE, 5.CO, 5.MHS, 8.IP, 8.SPE, 8.CO, 8.MHS)
2. Students should demonstrate knowledge of how the current service delivery system disrupts or supports the oppression, discrimination, and injustice of children, youth, and their families. and articulate alternative design possibilities in the field of Children & Youth and their Families in Society to address such problems as:
a. Level and type of attention to the basic needs of families (promotion)
b. Lack of prevention as a focus of the service system
c. Lack of social services attached to concrete provision
d. Unequal distribution of services based on the current policy framework
e. Racial and ethnic disparities among those who enter the system and the differential ways in which they are served
f. Structural discontinuities in the public vs. private provision of services
(Practice Behaviors 4.IP, 4.SPE, 4.CO, 4.MHS)
3. Students should demonstrate in depth knowledge and the ability to apply evidence-based programming and professional knowledge in the design and implementation of comprehensive, culturally responsive services for children, youth, and families. Students should be able to critique evidence-based programming in terms of its cultural framing and how power and inequities are being initiated and reinforced.
(Practice Behaviors 5.IP, 5.SPE, 5.CO, 5.MHS, 8.IP, 8.SPE, 8.CO, 8.MHS)
4. Students should demonstrate in depth policy analysis research in one or more of the specific areas of services and policies to children, youth, and their families, be it family support services, child protection, foster care, juvenile justice, or the like. (Practice Behaviors 8.IP, 8.SPE, 8.CO, 8.MHS)

Design

This course will be taught using lectures, visiting lecturers, class and small group discussion and exercises, media, and class projects and papers.

Intensive Focus on Privilege, Oppression, Diversity and Social Justice (PODS)

This course integrates PODS content and skills with a special emphasis on the identification of theories, practice and/or policies that promote social justice, illuminate injustices and are consistent with scientific and professional knowledge. Through the use of a variety of instructional methods, this course will support students developing a vision of social justice, learn to recognize and reduce mechanisms that support oppression and injustice, work toward social justice processes, apply intersectionality and intercultural frameworks and strengthen critical consciousness, self knowledge and self awareness to facilitate PODS learning.