Katherine A. Kendall

Toward Reciprocity in Technical Assistance Through Collegial Relationships

Much has been said and written about Western influence on socicrl work education throughout the developing world, and this influences has indeed been considerable. Through the United Nations social’ welfare advisory services program and bi-lateral technical assistance activities, western educators were widely used after the second war to start or improve schools of social work in Asia and, to o lesser extent, in Africa and Latin America. American educators were recruited to introduce new areas of study (primarily casework) into establishes schools in Europe and Latin America, and tended to serve as role models for scores of foreign students who flocked to the United States to obtain what they and the world regorded as the ultimate in professional education for social work. In the developing world, and particularly in Asia, western educators as a group were universaily admired and emutated. Upon return to leadership roles in their

Social work education in the 1980s: accent on change

Katherine A. Kendall, PhD, is honorary president and retired secretary-general of the International Association of Schools of Social Work. She is on the Editorial Board of International Social Work. The World Guide to Social Work Education published in the early 1970s by the International Association of Schools of Social Work (World Guide, 1974) was compiled at a time of considerable turmoil in social work education. Students were demonstrating; faculty members were lining up for and against radical change; schools of social work were becoming democratized, with deans and directors deposed from their seats of power; indigenization and reconceptualization of social work education were the rallying cries throughout the third world; foreign curriculum models were denounced and renounced; proponents of ’macro’ and defenders of ’micro’ in the curriculum were engaged in close to mortal combat. It was an exhilarating and exhausting period in a world of mixed hope and confusion. A new edition of the World Guide (1984) offers an opportunity for cross-national examination of social work education in the 1980s. There is less talk now about change and more about survival, but to survive schools of social work must understand and creatively respond to the needs and challenges of their respective societies. This inevitably involves change which is here described through examples of programmes in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe that depart in structure or in content from traditional patterns of social work education. Information from entries in the latest version of the World Guide has been supplemented by material in unpublished papers prepared by participants in an international seminar held in New York in 1984 on current influences on social work education.’

The evolving family: an international perspective

There is both good news and bad about one of our most durable and most resilient social institutions the family. The bad news is that the family appears to be in a state of crisis all over the world. The good news is that there is unquestionably universal recognition that the family, as the basic unit of society, will survive despite its apparently weakened state in every geographical region. Throughout the world the family is characterized by enormous complexity and variety in its forms, functions, roles and responsibilities, but the basic needs of families are all common human needs and, thus, universal. To understand those needs, this article will look, albeit in a most superficial manner, at a host of factors, policies and programmes that influence, both positively and negatively, the situation of families today. Fortunately, excellent documentation is available because the United Nations, along with a number of international non-governmental organizations, has recently rediscovered the family and the relation of family well-being to the general well-being of societies everywhere. Within the past five years there has been a veritable explosion of international research, reporting and conference activity from Vienna to New York, from Moscow to New Delhi, from Tokyo to Porto Alegre, Brazil, which has served as the source of the information here presented about the evolving family.’ I

Signals from an Illustrious Past

Social workers should reflect upon their heritage, and accept their obligation to work for constructive social change while continuing to individualize human need

A sixty-year perspective of social work.

Since 1920, social work has experienced a vast amount of growth and change. An overview of these years, as seen through the pages of Social Casework, highlights the important contributions that have been made to improving the quality of family and individual life and in responding to social concerns.

Dream or NlGhtmare

* Dr. Kendall is Secretary-General of the International Association of Schools of Social Work. This article was prepared for presentation or the sixth Eileen Younghutband Lecture at the National Institute for Social Work Training in London on 11 October, 1972, and is reprinted by kind permission of Social Work Today. It has also appeared in the Journal of Social Work Education (Spring 1973). HAT is t’he future of social work education? Whenever social work

A Tribute To the Founders

as well as in the beckoning light of its future. It is fortunate that we already have a glimpse of the pioneers in the illuminating work of Dr. Alice Salomonl of Germany, to which I shall later refer in greater detail, in the impressive Third International Survey of Training for Social Work prepared for the United Nations by Dame Eileen Y~ounghusband,’ and in a delightful small volume on social work education in Britain by Marjorie Smith.3