A STUDY FOR THE CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL WORK IN KOREA

한국 사회사업교과과정 개발을 위한 연구

During last five years several workshops and seminars among social work educators, in and out country, has taken place. In those gatherings there has been, criticism on American model on which curriculum of social work in Korea has mainly based, and many proposals which most developing countries should consider and adopt for developing their own curriculums. The proposals could be summarized as follows; 1. Specification of developmental functions of social work should be made so that the curriculum could involve. It also must come from own societal needs and own national development task. 2. Social work should participate and make contribution to plan and solve the main social problems in own countries. 3. Clarification of educational objective in undergraduate level should be made and one of them must be related to the first professional degree. 4. There should be the courses which provide the content of macro level participation. How much of the proposals are reflected in the current curriculum of Korea? What are the problems Korean social work education has been faced in connection with reflecting the proposals? What kinds of task we should or could perform in order to adopt the proposals? These are the questions which deserved to be studied. The followings are the answers to the questions; 1. The new courses such as social welfare policy and planning, Social Development, Population Dynamics and Family Planning, Social problems, Special Issues in Social Welfare, etc, are placed in the curriculum. 2. Though the new courses are added the courses of case work, group work, and community organization are strongly remained it means that integrative method is not quite adopted and that conflicts are taking place between new and old fashion. 3. Fieldwork placement policy has been changes from concurrent to block and from social work method oriented to social problem oriented. 4. There are lack of integration among the all courses, of consistency between pre and post courses and connection among the related courses. 5. Establishment of image of social worker with B, A. degree should be urgently taken place. It can't be done by social work field alone but by cooperation with all the forces related to the social work practice. 6. B. A. graduate should have a common base of knowledge and competence. It could be come from the clear and specified objectives of undergraduate level education. And agreement among the member schools on the objectives can call on the fundamental similarities in each curriculums. Different programs from one school to another can be tolerated as long as there are fundamental similarities among the schools. Basic concepts and framework of social work should be kept clearly. It is a slow and long process to make social work recognized as a profession in the developing countries. Korea can't be and exception. Failure of having social work be indegenous can't be the reason to refuse an change the basic concepts of social work. One of he most important task which social work education in Korea must achieve in the near future is to establish the minimum requirement courses in the curriculum. Social work field, on the other hand, must find the positions for the social works in the various settings and institute. Clear role and image of social worker can be obtained by doing that.