Social Welfare - Ethics for Caring Professions

Catalog description

This course will introduce students to ethical frameworks relevant to professional practice in the caring professions and to equip students with skills to apply these frameworks in practice. Specifically, this course will introduce students to scholarship on everyday ethics, the ethics of care, and virtue ethics in social work, health care, education, and other allied professions. This scholarship invites students to consider ethical practice as something that permeates every aspect of caring professionals’ daily lives and work, through habituated everyday practice, as well as to consider what constitutes good care, and to identify the moral dispositions of good caregivers. In identifying these moral dispositions, this course draws upon the KU IRISE values of integrity, respect, innovation, stewardship, and excellence – as well as the core values of the social work profession, as articulated in the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics – service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance human relationships, and competence. Students will identify skills necessary to embody these values and to foster their personal development as pre-professional students entering careers in social welfare, health care, education, and other related fields.