World View: A Look at International Social Work Education
By Peter Craig
Social worker Anuradha Bhosale, chairwoman/vice president of AVANI (Action for Voluntary Association and Networking in India), visits the University of Denver to tell social work students about her work, which includes rescuing child laborers and advocating for the rights of underprivileged women.
Part of studying and then practicing international—or global—social work is understanding how U.S. social work has influenced it, and how it hasn’t.
Like it or not, the United States has been the 800-pound gorilla in nearly everything, from world politics to global social policy. “For a long time we had a somewhat–paternalistic or domineering approach where social workers would go abroad with the idea that ‘we have figured out things, so let us teach you how to do it,’” says Dr. Leyla Ismayilova, associate professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, University of Chicago.
Dr. Leticia Villarreal Sosa, associate dean for research and faculty development and professor, School of Social Work, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, would agree that the often-service-oriented social work Americans have done abroad “can be kind of colonialist and oppressive, and more about our need to go and do a project, and feel better that we painted this wall or played with children in an orphanage, versus really engaging on an equal basis with communities and mutually learning with them.”
Vive La Différence
As part of California State University Long Beach’s regular two-week study-abroad program in Germany, MSW students visit Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate in 2023 and Hamburg’s St. Mary’s Cathedral in 2025 (right).
To be effective in other countries, U.S. social work students need to get the bigger picture, learning the socio-economic-political dynamics behind problems, how the social work profession there operates and developing cross-cultural competence, educators say. “Things are so different in every country, and, in turn, in the way we do social work in the U.S.,” says Karen Bensen, MSW, adjunct faculty and former professor of practice, Graduate School of Social Work, University of Denver. For example, U.S. practice favors individual therapy, “whereas in many other countries the solutions are more community oriented,” partly from cultural tradition but also because of lack of funding and other resources.
Latin American social work, during the 1960s, adopted anti-imperialist and Marxist theories, moving away from the U.S. perspective, says Trinity College-Hartford Visiting Lecturer Fernando Ricardo Valenzuela, who as an MSW student at the University of Connecticut (UConn) in 2023 participated in a travel-study program in Puerto Rico. “This resulted in the profession taking more of a macro-oriented lens that more directly confronted systems of oppression and better met the needs of the working class.”
Attending the “39th Annual Social Work Day at the United Nations” in 2023: University of Connecticut social work professor Dr. Rebecca L. Thomas (front row, second from left) along with Fernando Ricardo Valenzuela (back row, left) and other students. That year’s focus, says Valenzuela, “was all about raising awareness to barriers for people with disabilities and the role of social work in addressing those.”
Valenzuela, who currently serves as an independent research consultant for the UConn School of Social Work, adds that “in certain South American countries, social workers are not qualified to do therapy; it’s considered the psychologist’s job.”
Varied Educational Approaches
At the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s School of Social Work, there’s a required MSW course called “Global Social Work Practice,” a track called “Immigrants, Refugees and Global Practice,” and internships in Mexico and Honduras. Villarreal Sosa—who practiced abroad, first in Bulgaria and then for nearly a decade in Azerbaijan—works to instill in her global social work students the importance of committing to a single country and establishing strong relationships there. (She’s even gone back to Azerbaijan “to attend weddings and things like that.”)
The UConn School of Social Work features the Center for International Social Work Studies, directed by Dr. Rebecca L. Thomas, who is also a professor and a co-author (with Dr. Lynne Moore Healy) of the textbook “International Social Work: Professional Action in an Interdependent World.” MSW students in the school’s global focus area take the required course “International Social Work: Global Issues and the Profession,” a related elective such as “International Development Theory and Practice” and do a local field placement at sites like the United Nations, one of the Connecticut senators’ offices or a nonprofit organization.
Left: Anuradha Bhosale with social work adjunct faculty member Karen Bensen. Right: In 2024-25, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley MSW student Kelly Ryan (at head of table in checkered shirt) did an internship in Honduras with COFAMIPRO (Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Migrants of El Progreso). Here she discusses the Trump administration on COFAMIPRO’s weekly radio show “Abriendo Fronteras” (Opening Borders) with Dr. Samuel Nickels (left), an expert witness for asylum cases in the U.S., and COFAMIPRO members Doña Edita (second from left) and Doña Pilar (right)
There is no formal track or focus area in global social work for MSW students at the California State University Long Beach School of Social Work, but it does have a course called “Social Work Policy and Practice in Germany: Historical Political Background and Current Implementation,” with a related two-week study-abroad program in Berlin and then Hamburg that some 20% of the class are able to go on. “We do a lot of comparative analyses with what’s happening in the U.S., but we also tour different social work agencies, communities, and health and mental health agencies,” says Dr. Nancy Meyer-Adams, professor and director. After the trip, the study-abroad students report on what they learned to the rest of the class.
The University of Chicago’s Crown School offers the master’s-level “Global Health & Social Development” pathway. One required course is “Program Evaluation in International Studies,” sometimes taught by Ismayilova, who gained a lot of experience doing evaluations in countries like Burkina Faso, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda.
Still, Ismayilova points out, even for social work students “who may never actually work internationally, understanding how the same [subjects], like child and family services, mental health, and substance abuse, are addressed in other parts of the world can be extremely valuable.”
International Social Work: Research Highlights
Currently, the National Institute of Mental Health is funding a study by Dr. Leyla Ismayilova, associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, in her home country of Azerbaijan on the well-being of families and children. It compares three different approaches: (1) use of mental health services; (2) focus on family communication and quality time spent together; and (3) an economic strategy to reduce family struggles by establishing “child savings accounts” for education and for developing employability skills that parents would regularly contribute to and that would receive a 200% match. Says Ismayilova, “We found that economic intervention is actually much better in improving self-esteem among children and reducing depression than mental health intervention.”
Also exploring post-Soviet society, Dr. Rebecca L. Thomas, professor, School of Social Work, University of Connecticut (UConn), was recently in Armenia for a study, interviewing Russian and Indian labor migrants: “We were looking at the work of international social workers rethought for a postcolonial context.”
And Thomas’ recent MSW student Fernando
Ricardo Valenzuela, now an independent research consultant at the UConn School of Social Work and a visiting lecturer at Trinity College-Hartford, has been co-authoring a study on the different perspectives on climate change between youth and young adults from the Global North (which generally includes the U.S., Europe and other traditional colonizers) and those from the Global South (which normally encompasses Latin America, Africa and other regions that were most victimized by colonization).
Following are samples of published research material on international social work:
Note: For additional historical information on the subject, see the “International Social Work Leader Review” (cswe.org/centers-initiatives/kendall-institute/international-social-work-leader-review/).