I hope your week is going well. Sorry to take a bit to get this out to you. I will also acknowledge that it is a lot of reading. It is good, but it took me a few hours to get through it all.

Unit Introduction and What You Will Learn

Week two is asynchronous, with no in-person class and no lecture video. Students will be introduced to the history of social welfare programs in the United States (Edin & Shaefer, 2016) and have the opportunity to share examples. They will also read about retrospective policy analysis and the challenges of classical policy analysis. There are forums where you can engage with these topics and practice related skills. Some forums ask students to consider university policies and academic arguments through a scholarly lens.

The learning objectives this week include:

• Be able to explain how the United States has traditionally supported people experiencing poverty through social programs
• To understand the process of retrospective analysis
• Provide meaningful feedback regarding the MSW program policies
• Describe the rationale for rebooting the field of policy analysis

Unit Assignments

Read

• Edin and Shafer (2016) Chapter 1: Welfare is Dead
• Linquiti (2022) Chapter 2: Thinking about the Past: Retrospective Program and Impact Evaluation
• Linquiti (2022) Chapter 3: Obstacles to Use Classical Policy Analysis Models in the Real World

A-01 Weekly Online Discussion Forum

The expectation is that each of your replies will be substantive and provide meaningful perspectives, contributing to the forum’s conversation and scholarship. They can be related to the prompts or building on conversations shared by peers. There are six forums for this week, and you are expected to make at least four replies across any of the forums. These forums include the following:

• The forum Known Examples of Welfare Being Dead asks students to reflect on the chapter or share stories of people who have some correlation with those shared in the book.
• Students can reflect on HU Social Work Policies and share feedback on these to impact the future of our program.
• One forum provides a quick exercise to Practice with Theory of Change and Logic Models.
• Chapter Two Discussion Questions give opportunities to reflect on and practice ideas discussed in chapter two.
• Chapter three provides a scholarly argument proposing a new way of engaging in policy analysis. How To Make Academic Arguments provides a space for students to engage in meta-discussion regarding how the author does this.
• Chapter Three Discussion Questions give opportunities to reflect on and practice ideas discussed in chapter three.

Unit Resources

You can find the Master of Social Work Student Handbook, where we have our written formal policies for the program. There is no lecture video or slides this week.

To-Do List

• Read chapters 2 and 3 of the textbook and Welfare is Dead in the $2 per day book
• Complete at least four replies across any of the six forums