I hope your week is going well. I know I mentioned this before, but it is a lot of reading. Last year when I read this, it took me a few hours to get through it all.

Unit Introduction and What You Will Learn

Week two is asynchronous. 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 (Linquiti, 2022). 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 lecture video will be posted by the end of Tuesday and will include examples of program logic models.

The learning objectives this week include:

• Develop skills to consider theories of change in
• 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

Content

• 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
• Watch my lecture video (likely to be posted Tuesday)

W-02 A-01 Asynchronous Participation and Engagement

The expectation is that each of your replies will be substantive and offer meaningful perspectives that contribute 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 6 replies across any of the forums and read all of your peers’ replies. 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 Heritage University’s Social Work program policies and share feedback on these to impact the future of our program.
• One forum provides a quick exercise to describe a program and 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 listen to a podcast episode for this week’s reading Chapters 2 and 3: When Logic Models Meet Wicked Problems, or see the entire series Podcast Series.

You can find the Master of Social Work Student Handbook, which contains our formal written policies for the program as a resource on this weeks course page. I’m working on a lecture video, but I have another project I need to finish first, and I’ll have it posted by the end of the day Tuesday (and I’ll update this page with the video then). I want to bring together some examples of logic models and discuss theories of change, as I think they apply to many potential applications in macro practice.

To-Do List

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