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Program overview

Short-Term Option:
Spend two enriching weeks in Dingle, Ireland, engaging with critical topics in the field of social work. Short-term course offerings like Human Diversity and Social Justice and Social Welfare Policy provide a focused, immersive look at how social systems operate across cultures. You’ll explore key issues such as equity, access, and advocacy while gaining a deeper understanding of how Ireland addresses social challenges and supports vulnerable populations.

The Dingle program provides future social workers with a meaningful opportunity to expand their global perspective, strengthen their commitment to service, and enrich their education through real-world, cross-cultural learning.

3 Credits

Liberal Arts Exploration

  • Social & Global Awareness
  • Humanistic Inquiry 
  • Social/Behavioral Science foundational core 

 

 

Offered

Summer 2 Short Term

Faculty

Sasha Hazen Aaronson, MSW, MPA

Maura McCarthy Rhodes, MSW, LCSW

Description

Explore human diversity and social justice through a global lens in Dingle, Ireland, with immersive, real-world learning experiences. This course goes beyond the classroom with opportunities to engage directly with the local community through field trips, guest speakers, and interactive discussions that bring course concepts to life. Students will meet with community members and professionals who share firsthand perspectives on issues of diversity, equity, and social justice in an Irish context.

Through a framework rooted in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, students will examine how characteristics of diversity shape identity and influence experiences of privilege, oppression, power, and marginalization. The course emphasizes the intersectionality of these factors aimed at addressing systemic inequities and promoting human rights

3 Credits

Offered

Winter Short Term

Faculty

Kerry (Kate) Kelly, MSW

Description

Irish and U.S. social welfare history and practice today are distinctive one from the other but both retain structural and cultural vestiges of their shared English Colonial roots. In this course, students will explore the common foundation of social welfare in both nations and follow the singular paths of each nation in establishing their own priorities in social programs and practices to support and control of their citizens.
 
Students will learn from Irish lecturers as well as SHU faculty about the fundamentals of social welfare, while exploring in breakout groups how housing, healthcare (including mental health), food and water, child welfare, immigration and criminal justice are structured and implemented in both nations. A study of commonalities and contrasts, this course challenges students to consider the perspectives and practices of these two very different political entities both to support and control their populations, and the structural and cultural variations that have informed U.S. and Irish practice today.