St. Edmund's College
"Facta Non Verba"

ABOUT The Department

Social Work as a course of study is not new in India but it has taken flight and shape particularly in North East India. In the earlier years, students from the North-Eastern region who wanted to pursue a career in Social Work had to go to other parts of the country for acquiring a Social Work Degree. Philanthropic practice has always been a part of Indian culture and the same is also experienced in the North East but there is a felt need to redirect philanthropy into a subject as Social Work so as to make it more scientific and professional.

Brief History: The Department of Social Work was established in St. Edmund’s College in May 2007 and is the first college in North East India offering a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Work. The Department is affiliated to the North Eastern Hill University. The Department came into being when the congregation of Christian Brothers felt the need to prepare a generation of young people who will address issues of the region and the nation as a whole from a totally professional perspective by diagnosing, examining and providing solutions to issues that plague our society.

The course content was decided by an expert panel comprising of Dr. B.P. Sahu, the then Head, Department of Adult and Continuing Education, Prof. Nikhilesh Kumar (retd), Department of Sociology, NEHU and Dr. Kalpana Desai, the then Reader, Mizoram University. The syllabus includes, Social Work papers such as Case Work, Group Work, Community Development that gives students a better understanding of the society and how people behave, and other papers such as Sociological and Psychological Concepts, about polity and economy through a paper called Economic and Political Concepts, Integrated Social Work Practice, Social Welfare Administration and Social Research, Social Justice and Human Rights and Development Communication and Socio-Economic programmes.

The Department has the following objectives:

1. The BSW degree curriculum has an educational objective of providing professional education for entry into the social work profession by equipping students with knowledge, values, skills that are essential for social work practice.

2. The course intends to prepare students to deal with complex and challenging personal and social problems in an effective manner.

3. The course enables students to relate theory to practice, and also to relate experience to theory. This would give experiential and experimental learning to the students with real life situations under supervisory guidance.