Continuing Education in the MicroMasters Program

Social workers taking courses from our MicroMasters program on edX may receive social work continuing education contact hours for their participation.

In order to receive social work CE hours, please enroll in the course on edX as a verified learner. Only those whose completion is verified through edX are eligible for social work CE hours.

The following MicroMasters courses are currently offering social work CE contact hours for verified completion:

Diversity and Social Justice in Social Work

Visit the edX Diversity and Social Justice in Social Work website

Lead Instructor

Jamie Mitchell

Course Description

Students will actively explore how societal power and diversity characterize and shape the human experience, and are critical to the formation of social structures, cultural understandings, group and organizational processes, and identities. The dimensions of diversity are understood as the intersectionality of multiple factors including age, class, color, culture, disability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity and expression, immigration status, political ideology, race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation. In this course, students will learn how current experiences of privilege and oppression are shaped by historical forces, societal structures, social constructions, group and interpersonal processes, and human understandings, including an understanding of the institutional, organizational, policy, and socio-cultural arrangements that contribute to them. Additionally, this foundation course will explore formulations of human rights, including positive rights, and negative conditions that need to be eradicated. This course also studies how social justice and injustice occur in organizations, institutions, and society; relevant theories that can inform work for justice (e.g., critical race theory, and components of many theories); and how mechanisms of oppression and privilege work (e.g., marginalization, exploitation, violence, cultural hegemony, and powerlessness).

Course Objectives

1. Describe community and organizational work for social change.
2. Demonstrate knowledge and skills for working for justice, enacting critical consciousness, and engaging and addressing issues of power and diversity.
3. Describe the dynamics of difference and dominance/oppression and how they impact human functioning and social relations within and across diverse groups.
4. Describe how structural differences in society are shaped by historical, psychological, social, and political factors.
5. Demonstrate knowledge of social locations, constructions, processes, and identities and the diversity within these. This includes increased knowledge about the forces that shape complex selves, relationships, and worldviews.
6. Demonstrate skills in critical contextual thinking, applying multiple theories and frameworks to illuminate underlying assumptions, biases and possible opportunities, and engaging in praxis.
7. Demonstrate awareness of the sources of power, how to mobilize power towards positive change, and ways to challenge oppressive assumptions, biases, and prejudices.
8. Apply a social justice lens in understanding aspects of the criminal justice system.
9. Describe the relationship between "broken windows" policing and stop-and-frisk policies.
10. Identify at least two social factors shaping disparate health patterns in the United States.
11. Describe the relationship between health disparities and health equity.
12. Define "structural intersectionality."
13. Define "political intersectionality."
14. Define "representational intersectionality."
15. Apply an intersectional framework to a case example.
16. Describe methods for continuing a lifelong process of recognizing our biases, learning how to change oppressive behaviors and structures, and building a more socially just multicultural society.