Jacob Campbell

Jacob Campbell

School social worker practicing with students with EBD, university adjunct faculty, PhD student, Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker, father, husband, and active community member

Fall 2025 SOWK 486w Class 02 Weekly Email

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I am looking forward to seeing you all today. Some cool things happening that you might think about join. The student government association (SGA) is doing events at the Tr-Cities Campus this morning and at 4 PM before class tonight at CBC.

Unit Introduction and What You Will Learn

Week two is a cross-sectional look at some perspectives, frameworks, and theories commonly used in social work. It should assist in gaining awareness about the difference between these ways of thinking discussed in social work literature. We will look into the following:

  • Perspectives, theories, and frameworks
  • Systems theory
  • Ecological perspective
  • Strengths perspective
  • Solution-focused brief therapy

Learning Objectives:

  • Students will be able to articulate the difference between perspectives, theories, and frameworks.
  • Students will gain general knowledge of system theory, ecological perspective, strengths perspective, and solution-focused brief therapy.
  • Students will integrate theory knowledge and how it can be applied to client situations.

Unit Assignments

This week, your assignments include attending class and reading. You have a couple of readings from journal articles. No reading quiz must be completed.

Read

  • Graybeal (2001)
  • Green and McDermott (2010)
  • De Jonge and Miller (1995)

In-Class Attendance and Participation

Attend class

Unit Resources

The readings for this week are not out of the textbook and are being provided to help supplement the discussion. When we are talking about strengths perspective, one way we will frame the discussion is using ROPES (Graybeal, 2001). Green and McDermott (2010) provide some context and understanding related to the person in the environment. De Jonge and Miller (1995) give helpful ideas for how to draw out strengths from clients, which is an essential aspect of implementing strengths perspective. The hope of these readings1 is to introduce you to some peer-reviewed journal articles and some of the theories they discuss. It can help develop your integrative paper, which is due in October. Next week, your readings focus some on the orienting perspectives in social work.

If you are interested, I have a video discussing using Zotero to keep my references updated. You can see it at Transdisciplinary Literature Reviews using Zotero, How I Manage References [YouTube Video].

A couple of years ago, when I was teaching SOWK 459, Social Science Research Methods, I had a lesson Week 04 - Theoretical Frameworks - What is behind the research that we complete, which had some excellent information to dive a bit more into various theories within social work.

All of the presentations for this class can be found at https://presentations.jacobrcampbell.com. This week’s slides are Fall 2025 SOWK 486w Week 02 - Practice Related to Perspectives, Frameworks, & Theories.

The Lecture Videos tab in the MyHeritage course is where you will be able to find class recordings. The video this week is at [Fall 2025 SOWK 486w Week 01]().

Reference

Green, D., & McDermott, F. (2010). Social work from inside and between complex systems: Perspectives on person-in-environment for today’s social work. British Journal of Social Work, 40(8), 2414–2430. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcq056

De Jonge, P., & Miller, S. D. (1995). How to interview for the client’s strengths. Social Work, 40(6), 729–736. https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/40.6.729

Graybeal, C. (2001). Strengths-based social work assessment: Transforming the dominant paradigm. Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Social Services, 82(3), 233-242. https://doi.org/10.1606/1044-3894.236

To-Do List

  1. Please note that using the author’s names in the “text” of my discussion here is an in-text citation, and there are also reference list entries. This is what APA formatting looks like in writing. You will see it in your textbook and most journal articles you read as part of your ongoing studies. There is a link at the end of each reference. This is what is called a DOI number. It is helpful to find the discussed article and put the material into software like Zotero or Mendeley. The https://doi.org/ URL does not generally give you access to read the article, as it usually takes you to the journal’s abstract page for the piece. Most journals cost, and you can access them through the university library (unless it’s open access). You can find the articles added as a resource at the bottom of the page. ↩

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