| dc.description.abstract | Although it can be seen as somewhat of a new social work agenda, there is increasing literature addressing the implications of a globalised era for local social work education, research and practice. This includes moving beyond the traditional multicultural approach, increasing the amount of critical and global perspectives in the social work curriculum, and in turn increasing social work students' awareness to treat people as whole persons. To what extent this has been done in different social work education programmes varies across institutions. Therefore, this study investigated the current educational situation at three different Norwegian universities by conducting a document analysis on the social work curricula, benchmarked against national and global standards for social work education and training. The findings facilitated some recommendations for national guidelines on social work education, in terms of implementing global and critical perspectives. Furthermore, a focus group interview with social work educators was conducted to investigate possible challenges of implementing global and critical perspectives in education. The challenges addressed in this study are related to neoliberal educational policies and practices creating specialised courses, time constraints and lack of a central thread. Furthermore, the lack of relevant literature and the individual-oriented tradition influencing several levels are addressed. These findings also facilitated recommendations for Norwegian social work education, related to institutional openness to collaboration and information-flow, new publications, and closer collaboration with the field placements.
Key words: Critical perspectives, global perspectives, social work education, social work curriculum, educational standards, critical theory, Scandinavian social work, Norwegian Welfare state. | |
