Advances Vol. 2, No. 2


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Editorial
Barry R. Cournoyer

The Editorial Board began to plan this issue about one year ago. We hoped
to use it as a context to celebrate the 90thanniversary of social work educa-
tion at Indiana University. As one of the oldest schools in the country and

the only one to have a full continuum of education from the associate to doctoral
degrees, we have a long and distinguished history.

We thought it would be helpful to social work educators, researchers, and prac-
titioners to consider the nature and implications of the new Educational Policies
and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) that the Council on Social Work Education
(CSWE) was developing. We anticipated that they would be considered,
reviewed, revised, and probably approved sometime during the summer of 2001.
Indeed, they were approved in June 2001 and will be effective as of July 1, 2002.
(The text of the new EPAS may be found at www.cswe.org).

However, we had not expected the events of September 11, 2001. Familiar as we
social workers are with the beaten faces and bodies of abused women and chil-
dren, we were nonetheless unprepared for the full impact of the suicide attacks
upon buildings in NewYork City andWashington, D.C. and the subsequent bac-
terial exposures. The events remain profoundly disturbing.

In preparing this editorial, I am challenged by context and perspective.
Certainly, the 90th Anniversary of Indiana University School of Social Work
deserves recognition. I would dearly love to shout Happy 90th on behalf of our
thousands of alumni and others who have contributed so much to our school.
Context and perspective, however, tempers my enthusiasm. I mourn the thou-
sands who were killed on September 11th. I grieve their families’ losses as well as
those who lost love ones through exposure to bacterial agents. I wonder about
the impact upon our children, our relations with others, and indeed our future.
I also recognize more clearly than before what it may be like to be an Israeli who
is constantly alert to the possibility and reality of a car bomb, or a Palestinian
uncertain about almost everything. I wonder about the murdered, mutilated,
and missing in so many parts of our world—usually so far away from our every-
day experiences with McDonald’s and Starbuck’s—but suddenly so profoundly
near.

In such a context, how significant is the 90th anniversary of a school of social
work? Given the perspective generated by September 11th and its aftermath, how
much does it matter that social workers have new educational policies and
accreditation standards for their educational programs?

As I ponder these questions, my initial reaction is, not much. On reflection,
however, I think that could be might be amore accurate response. Might the 90th
anniversary of a school of social and a new set of educational standards for social
work be significant? Yes, I think could be is about right.

Here in the United States, the Indiana University School of Social Work is
almost as old as the profession itself. SocialWork has entered its second century



and nearly has our school. In celebration of this milestone, we invited Monique
Busch, Gerald T. Powers, David Metzger, Cyrus S. Behroozi, Sheldon Siegel, and
Barry R. Cournoyer to prepare a brief historical review of social work education
at Indiana University. A daunting task, the authors crafted an article that will
interest social workers everywhere.

In light of the recently approved Educational Policy and Accreditation
Standards (EPAS), we invited leaders in the School’s BSW, MSW, and Ph.D. pro-
grams to prepare brief reaction papers. Irene Queiro-Tajalli, Katharine Byers,
and Edward Fitzgerald prepared a BSW response; Marion Wagner, Paul
Newcomb, and Robert Weiler wrote an MSW reaction paper; and Barry R.
Cournoyer andMargaret Adamek prepared a Ph.D. response. These papers serve
to help us reflect upon the implications of educational standards in general and
the new EPAS in particular. Policies and standards may be viewed as a burden or
as an opportunity to reconsider and reinvigorate our profession by energizing
the nature and perhaps the manner through which we educate our future social
workers. Perhaps these papers may help us adopt the new EPAS as an opportu-
nity to improve the overall quality of the profession’s education, research, and
practice.

As a natural complement to the new EPAS, which require programs to evaluate
the effectiveness of their educational activities, we invited Barry R. Cournoyer to
address the topic of student learning assessment. He describes the Indiana
Model—a system that incorporates both direct and indirect methods for the
assessment of learning outcomes—that may be useful to social workers in set-
tings of all kinds.

We also accepted a refereed article that complements the themes of innovation
and assessment in social work education. Terry A. Wolfer, Miriam L. Freeman,
and Rita Rhodes of the University of South Carolina discuss the development
and implementation of an MSW-level capstone course that adopted a case
method form of instruction.

The Editorial Board and I are pleased to present this issue of Advances in Social
Work to the social work community. We publish it in celebration of the 90th

Anniversary of social work education at Indiana University and dedicate it to the
thousands of students, alumni, faculty, field instructors, social workers, commu-
nity leaders, and university colleagues who have contributed so much during
these nine decades.

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