DOI
10.1080/10437797.2015.1012931

Summary
This study is concerned with the integration of social work into undergraduate education through the use of systems and community practice frameworks. The study provides a detailed case-study of one university’s model of an undergraduate interdisciplinary minor connecting social work philosophy with other education disciplines. Richard-Schuster et al describe community action and social change as “the process through which people come together in community to engage in efforts that challenge injustice and seek to create changes in policy, practice, and institutions that lead to more outcomes”.  The authors detail the background literature of community action in the field of social work and how it succeeds and fails to address some issues. They make reference to the fact that a community and social justice framework builds on a systems approach to better understand structural frameworks and various responsibilities and theories in the field of work. The university in question has commissioned a panel to investigate the implementation of multi-disciplinary perspectives and group/team teaching in undergraduates. The panel looked at ways in which groups of undergraduates could collaborate and learning from one another in a multidisciplinary environment. This panel also investigated the barriers inhibiting the success of developing multidisciplinary programs. The initative to develop a multidisciplinary minor (module) was successful making for the creation of a 16 credit module called Community Action and Social Change (CASC). This provided students with the opportunity to: “(1) examine community action and social change concepts using a multidisciplinary framework; (2) address community action and social change efforts in multilingual and multicultural communities; (3) integrate, using multidisciplinary framework, social justice values into community action and social change processes; and (4) engage in service learning opportunities to promote community action or social change initiatives (CASC program materials)”.

The process of implementing the CASC minor into the university program is detailed on pg. 335(6). The integration of the minor was coupled with a feedback system to gain insight into its success. Faculty members involved were required to provide their own evaluation as well as gathering feedback from the receiving students – creating a feedback loop.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This study is related to the community development topic and offers methods to integrate community action processes into undergraduate education. The paper specifically mentions integration into the social work field via the community action for these undergraduate courses. The integration community action is the focus for this review under the topic of community development so the most relevant information has been chosen in the context of COSY objectives.

This study is also relevant to the development of a multidisciplinary teaching method which could be realigned with various fields of study as needed.

Although this paper does not mention the term sustainable development (SD) once, there is certainly room for SD to be integrate into a number of student learning objective – “examine community action and social change concepts using a multidisciplinary framework” – the mentioned multidisciplinary approach could very well include the theory of SD, however, if this is not the case then the potential for the realignment of this study objective with another more suited to the COSY objectives is possible (reimagining education at HEI) (multidisciplinary approaches)

Point of Strength
The paper is strongly associated with the development of multidisciplinary learning. The creation of a new interdisciplinary module and associated feedback loop evaluation set up could be useful for a similar module creation. Although it is primarily focussed on social work education, the social aspect could be realigned with sustainable development goals as well as the community integration aspect.