An Engaged Curriculum to Train Community Social Workers: Main Challenges and Lessons Learned

The paper presents and discusses an ongoing process of curriculum
design for the MA Course in Social Work and Social Policies at the University of
Sassari. The first part of the paper briefly outlines the overall Higher Education
(HE) policy context within which the need for an engaged curriculum arises.
It also briefly introduces some key concepts and guiding principles that
innervate the process of curriculum design described in the second part of
the paper. Notably, we will shortly outline the two pillars upon which our
curriculum design is based: Community Social Work (CSW) and Community
Based Participatory Research (CBPR). The central part of the paper describes
the process through which the curriculum design progressively evolved till its
present shape. This is done by referring to the progressive concatenation of
three different projects, respectively named PERARES – Public Engagement
with Research and Research Engagement with Society, EnRRICH – Enhancing
Responsible Research and Innovation through Curricula in Higher education,
and K4C – Knowledge for Change. In the third part of the paper, drawing on
evaluation exercises that were implemented at different stages of the process,
we present and discuss some of the lessons learned and main challenges that we
have being facing.