Teaching & Learning

Our goal is for every student who comes through our doors to leave with a formative year-long learning experience they can take with them into completing their journey in social work studies and beyond to their professional practice. 

Our teaching and learning approach is about an embedded, collaborative, and anti-oppressive new way of doing social work. Students come to approach social work not just from a transactional lens but from a transformational one through their direct practice. 

We’re intentional about placing students for student practicum experiences, Social Work Community Service (SWCOS), in organizations where they can help build overall capacity and work alongside community members to take steps to overcome racism and systemic oppression. These tend to be non-traditional social work environments. For example: A counselor’s office, a library, a recreation center, or a sports training organization. 

These environments often lack social work infrastructure. But people show up with needs where a social worker can help. A library, for example, is a place to borrow books. However, many people coming to Baltimore’s libraries have other needs like housing, mental health support, and getting help applying for public health assistance. 

By putting a social worker at a library, recreation center, or other existing community institution, we turn it into a civic engagement resource, which also positions people to engage in political social action. Our students help people come up with creative solutions that cut through obstacles and directly address their concerns. 

We teach our students to work in partnership with individuals, families, and communities to help them recognize the power that they hold to become change agents in their own communities. This has a ripple effect. It is why we are called the Center for Restorative Change. Our graduates are better equipped to make a difference. 

We support our students in their practicum work by offering an intimate community setting within the school of social work, where they can learn from each other about the work they’re doing. Those relationships are mutually supportive, mutually accountable, and mutually affirming. The Center is a great place for people to form connections that extend beyond the program into the community and throughout people’s lives.