Rural Social Work as a Contextual Specialty: Undergraduate Focus or Graduate Concentration?

Abstract

This paper will elaborate upon the notion of rural social work as a specialty and will focus on how educational programs can address the specialty. It will consider the best ways to incorporate the contextual knowledge required for the rural specialty into the educational sequence—what kind of contextual knowledge fits at the undergraduate level and what specialized knowledge fits primarily in graduate concentrations. The paper also will discuss the issue of whether the required specialized knowledge falls into a given sequence, such as methods or policy, or whether it cuts across them all. Throughout this paper, the term “rural” refers to open country and other non-metropolitan environments and is interchangeable with non-metropolitan (non-metro). The growing rural specialty is concerned not just with open country but with small and medium sized towns.