The Smith College School for Social Work is a professional school within Smith College that provides graduate social work education to students around the world. In its nearly century-long history, the school has educated approximately 7000 clinical social workers, including many leading social work intellectuals and trailblazers such as Bertha Capen Reynolds, Florence Hollis, and Lydia Rapoport, all of whom have been enshrined as eminent pioneers of the field. The school is ranked 16th in the US News and World Report ranking of graduate programs in social work.
History
Smith College School for Social Work originated from an emergency course given in the Summer of 1918-1919 to prepare social workers for service in military hospitals treating soldiers with “shell shock†returning from the First World War. Civilian psychiatric hospitals were already using social workers to assist physicians in obtaining patients’ social histories, considered a necessary ingredient for sound diagnosis, and to aid the patients in their “social adjustment†back to their communities after release from care. The Smith College course was the first formal training program for social workers to become trained as “psychiatric social workers,†specializing in social psychiatry.
The program was created by the combined forces of Dr. E.E. Southard, Director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, who was planning an emergency training course at the hospital, and Smith College President William Allan Nielson, who was looking for ways to use College facilities and equipment during the quiet months of summer to aid in the war effort. With financial support from the Permanent Charity Fund of Boston and under the auspices of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, which Southard headed, the training course began in July, 1918 with sixty-three students.
The course became a permanent program in 1919. Dr. F. Stuart Chapin, Smith College professor of Sociology was appointed the first Director, with Mary C. Jarrett, Chief of Social Services at Boston Psychopathic Hospital, and one of the founders of the emergency trainings held in 1918, appointed as the Associate Director. The newly established Smith College Training School for Social Work offered four training courses: medical social work, psychiatric social work, community service, and an advanced course in child welfare for individuals already engaged in social work with children. The philosophy and techniques of social casework, the hallmark of contemporary social work, undergirded all four courses of training. Classes in psychology and sociology were required of all students. The eight-week didactic program was held on Smith College campus with clinical demonstrations taking place in the Northampton State Hospital for the Insane. Students then went on to six months of practical training in hospitals and social agencies in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore. They returned to Smith College for a second eight-week didactic program the following summer.
Following the success of Smith’s initial emergency training course, several schools, including University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, The New York School of Social Work (now Columbia), University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins University instituted psychiatric social work training programs. The American Association of Psychiatric Social Workers (AAPSW) was established in 1921, and was absorbed into the National Association of Social Work in 1955, along with the other major social work associations.
The School Today
While the term “psychiatric social work†has long since been replaced in the social work lexicon with “clinical social work,†the SCSSW continues its long tradition of providing intensive education for developing social workers specializing in the provision of mental health-focused practice. Unlike the majority of schools of social work in the US, which have adopted a generalist paradigm that aims to introduce students to a wide range of social work settings and modalities, the SCSSW has retained its single focus on clinical social work, aiming for an in-depth education in the theories, skills and practices of clinical work. True to the interdisciplinary integration intended by its founders, the School’s pedagogical mission remains focused on developing clinical social workers firmly grounded in a holistic model of practice, that synthesizes not only psychological and social theories but the incorporation of knowledge in biology and other life sciences. As was true from the start, the hallmark of clinical social work as promulgated by the SCSSW is the interpretation of individual issues and problems within the context of the social, political, and economic systems in which they occur.
Program Structure
The intensive block structure of the program, unique to the School, also continues, though in a longer form than its original design. The current Masters in Social Work program consists of 27-months of intensive academic training. A ten-week didactic session of course work held during summer months is followed by an eight-month, 30 hours per week field internship, followed by another ten-week didactic session held in the summer, followed by a second eight-month, 30 hours per week field internship. Students return for a third and final ten-week didactic summer session before graduation. To curriculum at the School divides courses into four academic sequences: social work practice; human behavior in the social environment; social welfare policy and services; and research.
The Smith SSW field internships are a unique and intensive learning opportunity that provides students with the most advanced clinical training opportunities found in graduate social work education. The internship structure is not only designed for length but depth of experience. Students are placed in a social service agency for 30 hours per week (including two hours of individual supervision each week), in order to allow for an immersive experience in which a student can experience a fuller range of engagement with clients in a practice setting.
Because the internship program is nationwide, the School also has the advantage of being able to select the finest training sites across the country. More than 120 agencies in 20 states and Canada currently participate in Smith's field program, providing students with a breadth of clinical experience unmatched by other social work programs. Internship sites include schools, family service and child welfare agencies, child guidance and mental health clinics, medical as well as psychiatric units of hospitals and college counseling centers under private and public auspices. Internship agencies are responsible for continuing to carry out the professional education provided during the coursework session by providing sound clinical experience and supervision consistent with the quality and focus of the school's educational mission. Students in the field are consistently overseen by on-site supervisors and assigned Faculty Field Advisers.
The PhD program, established in 1964, prepares advanced clinical practitioners for leadership positions in social work education, research, and practice. Like the master's program, the PhD program is wholly concentrated on graduate education in clinical social work. Doctoral students are thus required to complete two nine-month clinical internships in addition to program of coursework and research. Similar to the master's program, the doctoral curriculum operates on a block plan of instruction in which periods of classroom study alternate with periods of clinical and research study in the field. Academic courses are taken at Smith College between June and August.
The two eight-month clinical internship periods (September through April) take place after the first and second summers of on-campus study. The clinical internship affords the opportunity to study and apply advanced practice methods to a range of clients and to study clinical theories and processes in depth. Ideally, students also gain experience in clinical teaching and contribute to theory development. Most doctoral students elect to develop work-study internships within their places of employment. These work-study internships serve as the two-year training site. Others develop fellowship opportunities at training centers or affiliate with agencies around the country or internationally. A Clinical Qualifying Examination, taken at the end of the first year field internship, and a Comprehensive Examination, taken during the second field internship, precede the dissertation, an independent scholarly research project that examines a topic relevant to clinical social work.
In both the MSW and Ph.D. programs, the School aims to produce generative clinical social workers adept in relationally-based, theoretically-grounded, and culturally responsive social work practices, well-prepared to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing field and to help shape clinical social work for future generations.
In addition to the masters and doctoral degree programs, the School provides a program of continuing education during the summer for professionals from around the country and world. The School currently offers a range of specialized certificate programs including advanced clinical supervision and palliative clinical care.
The Anti-Racism Commitment
The Smith College School for Social Work has long envisioned itself as committed to an anti-racism stance both in policy and programming. Nonetheless when Ann Hartman arrived as dean in 1986, there were few students of color in the student body. Since the previous dean, Katherine Gabel, had a strong commitment to increasing the diversity within the school and had made significant strides in diversifying the resident faculty, even the faculty was jarred by the reality of only one student of color in the graduating class. Based on a shared concern that a social work school without a critical mass of students of color was not good social work education for any student, increasing the enrollment of students of color was designated a school priority and a series of strategies were employed to achieve this goal.
One of the first steps undertaken by the School was to solicit support in achieving this goal from alumni of color. To this end, the School sponsored the Minority Alumni Conference on campus in the summer of 1987, to which all the school’s alumni of color were invited. This three-day conference convened with widespread participation by alumni of color from across the United States and Canada. By the end of the conference, a list of 33 proposals had been generated. These proposals were far-reaching and went beyond any strategic tweaking of the procedures in the admissions office or the awarding of financial aid. Collectively, these proposals made clear that the recruitment and retention of a diverse student body would require changes in all areas of the school’s institutional life; e.g. the recruitment and retention of a more diverse support staff; the inclusion of diversity content throughout the curriculum (and not just in designated “diversity†courses); greater attention to “required†diversity content in the field curriculum; and the recruitment and retention of agencies and supervisors, etc.
Following the conference, the school embarked on a number of significant new endeavors in support of anti-racism and diversity on campus. These endeavors included obtaining funding and grant support to help increase the enrollment of students of color and the hiring of a full-time director of admissions with a clear mandate concerning the recruitment of a diverse student body. The school also set an early priority on increasing the diversity among the school’s support staff and summer teaching faculty. The role of the Marta Sotomayor Senior Fellow (previously known as the Bertha Reynolds Senior Fellow) was created for senior adjunct teaching faculty who live in residence during the summer to assist in a variety of ways with advancing the school’s anti-racism commitment.
These early initiatives were also far reaching in that they raised consciousness within the school about the perniciousness of institutional racism and its capacity to simultaneously make race-based privilege both self-perpetuating and difficult to detect and address. This realization, in turn, led to the school adopting as a formal commitment to “becoming†an anti-racism institution and instituting a series of structures to facilitate the work towards this goal. Notable among these were:
- Monthly Meetings of Resident Faculty & Senior Administrators initiated in 1991 is ongoing.
- Anti-Racism Task Force - formed as a task group committed to advocacy in 1994. It takes action on anti-racism initiatives raised within the school community. This includes, but is not limited to, campus-wide activities, exhibits, awareness-raising, and coalition building. The task force is open to all members of the Smith community, works with other organizations on campus.
- Anti-Racism Consultation Committee (ARCC) was formed in 1995 for the purpose of being available to any member of the SSW community who wishes to consult around issues of race, ethnicity, culture, and social justice. The ARCC has representative membership from all constituent groups in the school community. SSW community members seeking consultation can contact any member of the committee. The ARCC has no authority to take action in the school community and maintains the confidentiality of those with whom it consults. However, based on its consultations, the ARCC may make recommendations to the dean about policy and programmatic changes to further the anti-racism commitment. The ARCC is also charged with assessing the SSW’s progress towards becoming an anti-racism institution and issues a progress report every two years.
The Bertha Capen Reynolds Pre-Doctoral Fellowship
The Bertha Capen Reynolds (BCR) Fellowship Program at the Smith College School for Social Work offers a twelve-month residential fellowship for a doctoral student in the dissertation phase of a social work Ph.D. program. The fellowship is named for the social work pioneer Bertha Capen Reynolds, a Smith College alumna (1908), a graduate of the first class of the Smith College School for Social Work (1918), and a member of the School’s faculty (1925-1938), who was described by the NASW as “a progressive educator, creative and original thinker, clinician and community worker who strove to broaden and deepen social work practice.†The BCR fellowship was created in 1987 by then-Dean Ann Hartman to honor Reynold’s legacy by supporting the development of scholars from underrepresented groups, whose work promotes both the underlying principles of Reynolds’ approach to clinical social work and the mission of the Smith College School for Social Work: the integration of the individual and the social; the advancement of anti-racism knowledge; the interpretation of individual problems within the context of the social, political, and economic systems in which they occur.
The BCR Fellowship is a part of the Five College Fellowship program. As a member of this program, the BCR fellow is provided research and teaching mentors and connected through the consortial office to resources and scholars across the five campuses (University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, and Smith College).
The Smith College Studies in Social Work
The Smith College Studies in Social Work, an in-house scholarly journal featuring articles on topics of relevance to clinical social work was inaugurated in 1930 and remains in publication today.
Notable Alumnae/i
Bertha Capen Reynolds, AB 1908, MSS 1919
Florence Hollis, MSS 1931
Ann Hartman, MSS 1954
Marta Sotomayor, MSS 1960
Alan Siskind, PhD 1972
James Herbert Williams, MSW 1975
Jim Wayne, MSW 1978
Caitlin Ryan, MSW 1982
Tomas Alvarez, MSW 2006
References
