Readings in Community Work - Hardcover

Henderson, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0043610455 ISBN 13: 9780043610459

Publisher: Unwin Hyman, 1981

Synopsis

Community work teachers have become increasingly aware of the need for community work students to gain a perspective which both encompasses the major themes within their subject and provides them with an historical context for their studies. This is the gap which Readings in Community Work is designed to fill. There will be some students who will find their way round the community work literature rapidly but these will generally be those who are specialising in the subject and who are engaged in a lengthy period of study, often at advanced level; the majority will not come into this
category. Social work, planning and health education students, among others, may have courses with tight time constraints, their libraries may not stock all the relevant journals and they will often be studying related subjects as well. The central purpose of this collection is to provide a comprehensive introduction to community work by making a number of carefully selected articles on the subject available in one volume.

The book contains four parts, three of which are divided into subsections to enable readers to locate the topics which interest them as easily as possible. Part One contains four readings which broadly address the question, what is community work? In Part Two a group of key ideas in community work has been identified and articles chosen accordingly: the idea of community needs, resources, power, ideology and change. Part Three examines the scope for intervention in community work practice, especially the levels of possible intervention: neighbourhood work, policy and organisational change, education in the community and participation. Finally, in Part Four, there are articles which broadly relate to the idea of
strategy in community work: tactics, role, political awareness, sponsorship and evaluation. There are 30 readings, and the book manages to include material on most of the major theoretical themes underlying the study and practice of community work in Britain during recent years. It provides, in short, a selection of essential community work literature on which students may base a more detailed study.

The editors are well qualified to initiate this new development in community work publishing. Between them they have wide experience of community work in practice and they have both been engaged in teaching on a variety of courses for community workers at the National Institute for Social Work for the last few years. David N. Thomas is the author of
Organising for Social Change and co-editor of Community Work: Learning and Supervision and Boundaries of Change in Community Work, on the second of which he and Paul Henderson collaborated.

Edition details

• Publisher: Unwin Hyman
• Publication date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0043610455
• ISBN 13: 9780043610459
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 198
• Editor: Thomas David