An Assessment of MSW Social Work Curricula: Semester-Long Courses Specifically Related to Immigrants and Immigration

ABSTRACT

Social workers are well positioned to meet the needs of the immigrant population in the United States (U.S.) and social workers across all fields and specializations should both feel competent and have the appropriate skills to work with immigrant clients. In this paper, we provide context around the immigrant population in the U.S. and discuss social work’s role in helping immigrants, and the role of the MSW degree in helping to prepare social workers to work with immigrants. Using publicly available data on MSW school websites, we analyze the prevalence of courses that specifically focus on immigrants or immigration. We found a lack of semester-long immigrant-specific courses in that only 12% of the programs offered these courses. We also noted the geographic clustering of some programs that offer these courses. We propose that schools do one of the following depending on their current course offerings, faculty expertise, and other resources: ensuring that basic content and case examples about immigrants are included in foundational social work courses, and when feasible or appropriate create elective courses, or create a concentration for those wishing to specialize in social work practice with immigrants.

KEYWORDS:

• Social work education
• immigrant
• pedagogy
• courses
• teaching

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data for this study were collected by the research team and are not publicly available at this time

Notes

1. If MSW programs were advertised as advanced generalist, they were coded as “both” because they offered advanced curricula in both clinical and macro topics.

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number [K08MD015289]. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.