An Engaged Curriculum to Train Community Social Workers: Main Challenges and Lessons Learned

The paper presents and discusses an ongoing process of curriculum design for the MA Course in Social Work and Social Policies at the University of Sassari. The first part of the paper briefly outlines the overall Higher Education (HE) policy context within which the need for an engaged curriculum arises. It also briefly introduces some key concepts and guiding principles that innervate the process of curriculum design described in the second part of the paper. Notably, we will shortly outline the two pillars upon which our curriculum design is based: Community Social Work (CSW) and Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR). The central part of the paper describes the process through which the curriculum design progressively evolved till its present shape. This is done by referring to the progressive concatenation of three different projects, respectively named PERARES – Public Engagement with Research and Research Engagement with Society, EnRRICH – Enhancing Responsible Research and Innovation through Curricula in Higher education, and K4C – Knowledge for Change. In the third part of the paper, drawing on evaluation exercises that were implemented at different stages of the process, we present and discuss some of the lessons learned and main challenges that we have being facing.