College Mission Statement

In the college catalog, there is this statement of Calvin's mission:

Our primary purpose is to engage in vigorous liberal arts education that promotes lifelong Christian service. We offer education that is shaped by Christian faith, thought, and practice. We study and address a world made good by God, distorted by sin, redeemed in Christ, and awaiting the fullness of God's reign. We aim to develop knowledge, understanding, and critical inquiry; encourage insightful and creative participation in society; and foster thoughtful, passionate Christian commitments. Our curriculum emphasizes the natural, cultural, societal, and spiritual contexts in which we live; and our learning proceeds as a shared intellectual task.

Calvin's mission statement, most fundamentally, involves graduating students intent on Christian involvement, action, and service to others. This commitment has proved to be a hospitable context in to offer a professional degree in social work.

B.S.W. Program Mission Statement

The mission of the B.S.W. program is to prepare students for competent and effective entry-level generalist practice in social work within the context of a Reformed-Christian, liberal-arts education.

B.S.W. Program Goals

Our progam goals are:

1. To prepare students for competent and effective entry-level, generalist practice with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities.

2. To promote and develop in students an understanding of social work knowledge, values, and skills with a strengths perspective emphasis.

3. To prepare students for professional practice within the context of a Reformed Christian, liberal arts perspective - particularly its emphasis on the pursuit of interpersonal, social, and economic justice with diverse persons.

Below, we clarify the main ideas used in our goal statements.

Reformed Christian Liberal Arts Perspective

In Reformed-Christian thinking, God is sovereign over everything, all of the world and every creature living in it. The Christian life is a person's response to God's revelation of Himself through the Holy Scriptures and His creation. Living that life involves everything a person does, whether it be selling insurance, studying Spanish, nurturing one's children, attending a worship service, or practicing as a professional social worker. All activities and callings are potentially of equal value and all can be carried out in a manner faithful or unfaithful to God's revelation. It follows, then, that crucial to living the Christian life is being informed about God's creation and discerning from God's revelation of Himself through the Scriptures and His creation, as best we can in this life, the manner in which Christians ought to relate to the many parts of God's creation.

Reformed Christians, as a community, have historically been committed to Christian higher education as a means of achieving the Christian life. The existence of Calvin College and other Reformed colleges are evidence of this commitment. Moreover, Calvin has long embraced a core study of the liberal arts integrated with understandings from Scripture as the most effective way to achieve the understanding necessary to live the Christian life. In 1970, Calvin College published Christian Liberal Arts Education. This document asserts that Christians, as a community, are called to work at an integrated understanding of the Scriptures and God's creation which encompasses the physical, biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual realities of the world along with their interrelationships (Calvin College Curriculum Study Committee, 1970: 57-61). These ideas were emphasized again in An Engagement with God's World: The Core Curriculum of Calvin College (1999), the college's revised statement of curricular purpose and structure. Consistent with this commitment of the Reformed community, Calvin's B.S.W. program includes requiring students to complete several core, liberal-arts courses. These courses are taken primarily in a student's freshman and sophomore years and serve as the foundation for the courses in the social work major.

Generalist Social Work Practice

Generalist social work practice has been defined in various ways. A definition used by the Calvin social work program defines a social work generalist as:

..a human service provider with broad-based skills, generic knowledge of persons and environments, and a commitment to social work values. The generalist is able to demonstrate basic competence in working with a variety of clients and services (Council on Social Work Education Commission on Educational Planning, Subcommittee on Specialization, 1979. Specialization in the Social Work Profession . Paper submitted to Board of Delegates, CSWE, Annual Program Meeting, Boston, MA).

The generalist practitioner is one who, through completing an accredited B.S.W. program, has the social work knowledge, skills and values to work at these purposes with client systems of several sizes and degrees of complexity. The clients of the generalist practitioner may include individuals, families, small groups, organizations, and communities.

Strengths Perspective

The strengths perspective represents a particular emphasis in a practitioner's approach to clients. It rests on the following assumptions (Saleebey, 2002, pp. 13-18):

1. Despite life's problems, all persons and environments possess strengths which can be used to improve the quality of clients' lives. Practitioners should respect these strengths and the directions in which clients wish to apply them.
   
   
2. Client motivation is fostered by a consistent emphasis on strengths as the client-not the practitioner-defines these.
   
   
3. Discovering strengths requires a process of cooperative exploration between clients and worker; "expert" practitioners do not have the last word on what clients need.
   
   
4. Focusing on strengths turns the practitioner's attention away from the temptation to "blame the victim" and toward discovering how clients have managed to survive, even in the most inhospitable of circumstances.
   
   
5. All environments-even the most bleak-contain resources.

Integration

The unique character of Calvin's B.S.W. program is represented in the integration of the above ideas. Thus, a Reformed-Christian perspective has definite implications for how we conceptualize generalist social work practice. In both our social work courses and our student seminars, we have sought to conceptualize the interface of Reformed-Christian thinking with generalist practice.

Reformed thinking views God's special revelation (The Bible) as teaching that there are three predominant turning points in God's relationship to His creation: First, God made everything in the world perfect-physical, biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual reality (Creation). Second, sin entered the world and distorted the creation (Fall). Third, God, in His infinite love, sent His son to sacrifice Himself for the disobedience of human beings, thus offering the hope of ongoing restoration of the creation (Redemption). Reformed thinking differs from many other theologies in that it gives primary emphasis to the "relationships" among the various parts of creation rather than to the parts themselves. Therefore, in reflecting on the impact of the Fall on human beings, Reformed thinkers emphasize the distortion in relationships that occurred between people and their environments, between people and God, between one another, and so forth. Similarly, in reflecting on the implications of Redemption, these thinkers emphasize that, because God has not abandoned His world but rather sent his Son to redeem it, healing and justice can occur in the broken relationships in different areas of life. In Reformed-Christian terminology, this process of restoring broken relationships in the world is often called "transforming culture" toward the ideal relationships intended by God in the Creation.

We have conceptualized generalist social work practice in the B.S.W. program at Calvin to be one aspect of this transformational or restorative process. Therefore, a worthy calling for a Christian is to gain the professional knowledge and skills necessary to aid clients productively in meeting their developmental needs and so contribute to the restoration of a troubled world.

In addition, as Calvin's B.S.W. program has matured, we have come to believe that "transforming broken relationships" at all levels of society is best accomplished by practitioners focusing on and identifying the strengths of clients and the directions in which they want to apply them. We believe this "strengths emphasis," addressed in many of the courses in the social work major, reflects the redemptive theology of a Reformed, Christian outlook.

B.S.W. Program Objectives

Much of the above discussion about the relationship of Calvin's mission and the goals of the B.S.W. program is reflected in our statement of the program's objectives. "Objectives" are our statements about what we expect students to achieve as a consequence of completing the B.S.W. degree.

Social Work Major Objectives

B.S.W. graduates will be able to:

1. Apply critical thinking skills within the context of professional social work practice.
   
   
2. Understand the value base of the profession and its ethical standards and principles, and practice accordingly.
   
   
3. Practice without discrimination and with respect, knowledge, and skills related to clients' age, class, color, culture, disability, ethnicity, family structure, gender, marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, and sexual orientation.
   
   
4. Understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination and apply strategies of advocacy and social change that advance social and economic justice.
   
   
5. Understand and interpret the history of the social work profession and its contemporary structures and issues.
   
   
6. Apply the knowledge and skills of generalist social work to practice with systems of all sizes.
   
   
7. Use theoretical frameworks supported by empirical evidence to understand individual development and behavior across the life span and the interactions among individuals and between individuals and families, groups, organizations, and communities.
   
   
8. Analyze, formulate, and influence social policies.
   
   
9. Evaluate research studies, apply research findings to practice, and, evaluate their own practice interventions.
   
   
10. Use communication skills differentially across client populations, colleagues, and communities.
    
    
11. Use supervision and consultation appropriate to generalist practice.
    
    
12. Function within the structure of organizations and service delivery systems, and seek necessary organizational change.
    
    
13. Understand and apply the principles of the strengths perspective to generalist practice with client systems of all sizes.
    
    
14. Integrate a Reformed-Christian perspective with the knowledge, skills, and values of the social work profession.