This course typically examines the role and structure of social work education at the BSW, MSW, and Ph.D. levels. The course usually emphasizes pedagogical issues in social work education, curriculum development, educational design, and instructional delivery. Emphasis is usually placed on preparing students for effective and competent teaching and the transmission of knowledge, values, and skills in academic and agency settings.

For this semester, the social work educational and pedagogical issue of focus will be scholarly writing and productivity. Scholarly writing is the deliberate dissemination of written ideas by and among persons trained in an academic discipline or profession with the intent of advancing that discipline’s or profession’s knowledge base. This dissemination can be in the form of journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, or books. As a prospective social work academician, a primary role you will have to assume is that of “publishing scholar.” Thus, scholarly writing is a critically important social work educational activity that significantly determines a professor’s career advancement, recognition, and influence. Examples of some of the topics that will be examined in this seminar are the importance of writing, factors that affect high publication productivity, writing for a specific journal, how to cope with rejection, the motivation to write, collaborative writing, the organization of ideas, and finding the time to write. The goal of this course, therefore, is to assist in the attainment of one of the primary objectives of the PhD program in social work at Morgan State University, which is to produce researchers and scholars who will contribute to the knowledge base of urban social work and to the general social science literature.