Master of Arts in Social Work (Children and Families)

Description

Children comprise one-third of the Indian population, which includes most of the world's largest adolescent population (10-19 years old). Due to their young age, lack of power, and position in society, children necessitate priority attention and fulfillment of their essential developmental needs. Further contemporary social realities such as climate change, rapid digitalization, and the COVID-19 pandemic have further exacerbated child vulnerability and marginalisation, highlighting the need for urgent redressal mechanisms. Besides, to harness the potential of the bulging adolescent population for social, economic, and political development, it is imperative to uphold and ensure every child's fundamental right to development and protection. Further, families are expected to provide an enabling environment and therefore are imperative to foster a nurturing context for growth and development of children.

In response to the current needs, social work with children and families has developed considerably in its approaches, perspectives, scope, and diverse professional expertise in fulfilling child rights, including economic, social, cultural, and political rights. Child participation, equity, and social justice have gained prominence within state frameworks and civil society engagement. The Constitutional provisions in India and international instruments pertaining to child rights require sustained visibility, especially in critical areas such as quality health care, educational opportunities, family strengthening, and all vital areas of child development. Besides, child protection and well-being necessitate either prevention or mitigation of all situations of violence, abuse, exploitation, and neglect that are experienced by large numbers of children in India and across the world. Family contexts also are key sites of interventions to foster wellbeing and equity in childhood.

While, on the one hand, efforts through activism and advocacy have brought to the fore the children's agendas in policy-making processes, the State, too, has developed newer interventions and strategies to address child vulnerability and marginalisation effectively. Children (all young persons who have not completed eighteen years of age), as central to the development discourse and individuals with rights as citizens, are at the core of this thematic area. The Master of Arts in Social Work (Children and Families) aims to nurture and enable social work practitioners to develop sensitivity, imbibe rights-based perspectives, values, and ethics, learn research skills, and build competencies for effective social work intervention with children and families. Both classroom teaching and fieldwork are core components of the programme. Classroom teaching through lectures, group discussions, exercises, presentations, case illustrations, assignments, etc., aims at conceptual clarity, reflective learning, analysis, and critical thinking. Fieldwork, which complements the classroom inputs, provides the learners with exposure to social realities, an opportunity for experiential learning, self-awareness, developing practice skills within a rights-based framework, and learning from and contributing meaningfully to organizations.

The programme covers a contextualized and theoretical understanding of child and childhood, the legal and policy framework pertaining to children: conceptual and theoretical understanding of family and building a critical perspective on dynamic family situations, skills for direct work with children and families, ability to design social work interventions, as well as conduct research in relevant areas. The programme endeavors to equip learners to engage in social work practice with children and families across different settings: institutional settings, community-based settings, government institutions, and non-government organizations, as well as learn skills for advocacy and research. The programme also strives to strengthen competencies to work towards systemic changes within formal institutions of the State and participate in interventions through State programmes. Job prospects range from employment in government programmes and projects, educational, health care, and residential care institutions, in local and international NGOs, to corporate social responsibility. Students can also pursue a career in research, consulting, teaching, and policy advocacy.

Programme Objectives

1. To develop an in-depth theoretical understanding of child, childhood and family within the socio- demographic and economic contexts in India.
2. To be able to critically analyse the present modes of development processes, policy and programmatic interventions and their implications for families and children.
3. To develop appropriate skills to work on issues impacting families and children at the micro-meso and macro levels.
4. To develop critical analysis and self-reflexive capacities to engage effectively as social workers with child-centric approaches.

Programme Outcomes

This curriculum will be a continuum of knowledge building on, understanding, developing critical analytical capacities of theoretical frameworks and translating theory to practice as praxis with focus on Children and Families. The first year will enable them to learn larger theoretical understanding on society, economy and development debates through the foundation courses. They will be then introduced to social theory, history and perspectives for Social Work practice together with basic skills of working with people. From the larger understandings of theory and practice the students will begin deepening and enlarging their theoretical knowledge base through the two core courses on Children and Families in the second semester. The macro and generalized knowledge base developed during the first year will be consolidated and deepened through a trajectory of courses on children and family both theoretical and practice in the third and fourth semesters.

Semesterwise Courses:

Note:The curriculum structure is tentative and subject to change.

Fee Structure:

*Institute reserves the rights to revise the Fees Structure of programme if necessary.

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