Social Work

Overview

Facing today's unpredictable and changing society, our students are expected to go beyond the existing paradigms and skills, and to develop innovative ideas and practical methods in order to assist their clients in negotiating and overcoming adversities in their daily lives.

Characteristics

This Social Work programme at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University is designed for Bachelor’s degree holders who would like to pursue a social work qualification on a part-time basis.

In this programme, students integrate theory and practice and generate new theoretical and practical insights to improve professional practice. The programme endeavours to nurture students with the following capacities and qualities:

• Contextual reflection: the ability to recognise the unique features of the social, cultural, and political contexts of human service practice and their implications for both theory and practice.
• Relate theory to practice: the ability not just to possess "espoused theories", but systematically to test and reflect on these theories and to develop them into personalised "theories-in-use" in a specific practice domain.  
• Recognising the complexity and inter-connectedness of problems and issues: the ability to relate one’s knowledge and skills to the context of professional practice, the local community, the Chinese mainland and the international community as a whole, and to appreciate the ethical and value considerations underlying professional practice.
• Evolving personalised styles and frameworks of practice: the ability to continually reflect on and integrate one’s professional self, personal values and life experiences, and hence be able to transform practice theories into new ideas and methods which are congruent with one’s personal style of practice and within the evolving practice context.