Community Work from an International Perspective – 15 ECTS credits. See the CURRICULUM-PLAN-CW-2012 All our curriculum plans are competence based which integrate theory and practice. In the Community Work course students are working with a virtual community case.

Community work is a planned process to mobilise communities to use their own social structures and resources to address their own problems and achieve their own objectives. Community work focuses on participation and fosters empowerment, emancipation and change through collective action.   Community work is closely related to work for human rights.  The community work process is about people in communities creating opportunities for growth and change.
‘Community’ can be understood in different ways, as geographical areas, interest groups, organisations or institutions.  Community work rests on a basic democratic ideal, anti-oppressive practice, equality and solidarity with the affected individuals. It aims to generate and communicate new insights with a view to effecting change.    As community work is an ideological, theoretical and practical approach to social life and the risk of social exclusion, it is ideologically sustained by a basic trust in people’s ability to improve their life chances. Society is the outcome of collective action and is perpetuated and/or changed by action.  

Content and objectives 

This course will focus on different theories, methods and approaches in community work from an international perspective. The course consists of several parts. One part focuses on theories and methods, another part consist of a case-study related to a video/virtual case. Students will make a project plan related to the case, by collaborating and comparing different approaches.
The students will learn about community work and its historic background and come to understand the risk of manipulation when community work is not worked out from a grass-root level. Students will also learn about the advantages and power in approaches carried out from a bottom-up perspective.  One of the main aims of the course is that students develop a critical understanding of the wide range of theories and methods of community work, develop the ability to recognize these in current projects and are able to design a project plan of community work, and show which steps and facilities are needed for realizing and managing processes and products.

Virtual Learning Material: http://vircamp.net/cw  (password protected material)

Social Work-Virtual Campus (SW-VirCamp): Co-construction of knowledge in an international e-learning study in community work

In 2009 two researchers from HiB, Anne Karin Larsen and Grete Oline Hole started a research project following the development of the new Community Work module. The project is continuing the second year and follows the second cohort of students in the study programme: Community Work from and International Perspective.

The title of the project is: Co-construction of knowledge in community work within an international virtual campus.

This research project aims to explore how knowledge about community work (CW) can be developed through cooperation among students and teachers in a virtual campus within a participatory action research (PAR) and participatory action learning (PAL) framework.

The analysis of data is an iterative process going on parallel with the data collection. A complete analysis of all data has not been done at this stage, and has to continue. Within our mixed methods approach, simple descriptive statistics of quantitative data as well as more in-debt text and content analysis from different sources of qualitative data are collected.

A central part of our research-data stems from the continuous evaluation of the education programme.  The data collection started in 2009 and ended in 2010 with the first cohort of students, and new data collection from the second cohort in 2011 will be conducted (table 1). Rich data sources are available and in phase 3 the data analysis process has started, papers and reports have been written and will continue in phase 4 and 5.

Table 1: Phases of the research project

Curriculum plans

SW-VirCamp offer the following courses:

E-Pedagogy for Teachers in Higher Education – 10 ECTS credits. See the Curriculum plan 2011

Community Work from an International Perspective – 15 ECTS credits. See the CURRICULUM-PLAN-CW-2012

Social Work in Europe – module 1 – 5 ECTS credits. See the Curriculum Plan_Module 1_2011

Comparative Social Work – Module 2 – 10 ECTS credits. See the Curriculum Plan_Module 2_2011/12

Time schedule for courses

TIMETABLE SW-VirCamp ONLINE COUSES