Describe your reactions and/or any issues related to your interaction with a client during your field education experience. Explain how you applied social work practice skills when performing the activities during your process recording.

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Assignment 2: Process Recordings

A process recording is a written tool used by field education experience students, field instructors, and faculty to examine the dynamics of social work interactions in time. Process recordings can help in developing and refining interviewing and intervention skills. By conceptualizing and organizing ongoing activities with social work clients, you are able to clarify the purpose of interviews and interventions, identify personal and professional strengths and weaknesses, and improve self-awareness. The process recording is also a useful tool in exploring the interpersonal dynamics and values operating between you and the client system through an analysis of filtering the process used in recording a session.

For this Assignment, you will submit a process recording of your field education experiences specific to this week.

The Assignment: (2–4 pages)

  • Provide a transcript of what happened during your field education experience, including a dialogue of interaction with a client.
  • Explain your interpretation of what occurred in the dialogue, including social work practice or theories, and explain how it might relate to evaluation covered this week.
  • Describe your reactions and/or any issues related to your interaction with a client during your field education experience.
  • Explain how you applied social work practice skills when performing the activities during your process recording.

Write up your experience.       a) what happened?       b) what was the experience like for you? comfortable or not? challenging or not? how did you feel before / during / after? etc.

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1) Choose a religion you wish to experience something of; if it is not one of the seven major world religions, confirm it with me.

2) Find a place of worship or service or event of that religion in the metroplex.

3) Go to it.

a) It is often good to contact them ahead, via phone, email, or webcontact.

b) when in Rome, do as the Romans do: take your shoes off, or cover or uncover your head, stand where they guide you to, etc.

c) be nice, quiet, respectful. You do not have to lie that you agree or like something if you don’t, and they shouldn’t expect you to.

d) ask questions if there is a format and opening for doing so; otherwise, observe.

e) make up your mind ahead of time as to whether or not you will give them your contact information.

4) Write up your experience.

a) what happened?

b) what was the experience like for you? comfortable or not? challenging or not? how did you feel before / during / after? etc.

c) did you encounter things that fit or did not fit our class-based description of the religion?

d) final evaluation: how would you sum up?

5) One to three pages, typed, double-spaced, etc., with name, course name and section, semester, and instructor name in upper right-hand corner.

Dr. Curtis-Thames

What I want in the paper proposal is this: (–of course it is typed, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12-point font or equivalent, one-inch margins, with your name, the course name and number, etc., at the top–)

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Scholars of religion,

Here is what you need to know about your paper proposal. I’ll answer two main questions.

I. What is the paper about and what is it for? and

2. How do I construct a paper proposal?

1. The paper is your critical thinking applied to an issue in light of two religions’ views of that issue.

  • The paper needs an issue to focus on. This should be something you personally and intellectually are actually interested in. Why write a paper about something you don’t care about? The range is very wide: it might be a belief (the nature of God), a practice (pilgrimage), an ethical concern (the attitude toward death and dying), politics (what is the relation between a government and a religion?), or spiritual experience (mysticism). You tell me, and if we need to change or fix it, I will let you know.
  • The paper needs religions to dialogue with. You need partners in the discussion. This is not you stating “just my opinion.” Other people have already thought seriously about almost anything you or I could come up with; well, in this case, with respect to your chosen issue, what do the two religions you picked say?
  • So the paper is *not* a book report, an encyclopaedia article, or “just my opinion.” It is you thinking carefully about an issue that matters to you in light of what two great traditions think about that same issue.

2. What I want in the paper proposal is this:

  • (–of course it is typed, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12-point font or equivalent, one-inch margins, with your name, the course name and number, etc., at the top–)
  • what issue you want to investigate,
  • why that issue matters to you,
  • which religions you picked to dialogue with, why you picked each of those religions, and
  • a start on your bibliography: that is, some sources you have begun to look at.

A page or two will almost always take care of it. Due friday night, October 18, just before midnight, uploaded to ecampus.

Dr. Curtis-Thames

Put your own identity in dialogue with the debates Jews have about it: is your identity religious? political? ethnic or racial? cultural? Who or what do you identify as?

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1. Christianity is obviously a massive force in the world, and has been for fifteen centuries. That is not to say anything comparative about any other religion. (There’s not a “most influential” contest going on here.)

First, using Christianity as an example of actual good effects and bad ones, please say: what are some possible contributions and harms a religion can make to society?

Second: when Christianity itself is very clear that it is about God’s mercy, not our being good, why do so many see it in moral terms: that if I do more good than bad, I’ll go to heaven? Christianity quite directly teaches this will never work; only grace, undeserved favor, can save us. So why do so many people, including many Christians, think it is about “earning” or “deserving” to “go to heaven”?

2. Islam has been a must-learn religion for thoughtful–or just concerned–Americans since 9/11. Our lack of attention paid to it before is a national lesson in the punishment reality doles out to ignorance.

– Just as unearned grace in Christianity is a difficult concept for many go-getter Americans, so peace through *submission* is no-go territory for Americans when thinking about Islam. Can submitting to God, to each other, to anything at all, be a source of non-dysfunctional peace in a person’s life?

– When a religion, especially a missionary religion like Buddhism or Islam, goes out from the culture it began in, the missionaries have to confront the challenge of sorting out which parts of the religion as practiced in the religion’s home base are essential to the religion, and which ones are just local ways it happens to work out in believer’s lives in that particular culture. Can you imagine what an Islam that was “as American as apple pie,” that felt no more “Middle Eastern” than Christianity does, might look like?

3. There are a couple of topics worth discussing with regard to Judaism.

The first is testimonial. Do you know people who are anti-Semitic? Is it a “thing” in your own family or other circles? Maybe your church has a specific view of the role of the Jews in the end-times; maybe you’ve heard conspiracy theories. Or maybe not.

Second, reflect if you will on the concept of there being a “chosen people.” Does this seem reasonable or likely to you, as a way God (if there is a god) would go about things? (The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said “How odd / of God / to choose / the Jews.” He was an atheist.

Third, Jews have long had what many of us have only acquired in the past few decades: an absolute obsession with figuring out our identity. Put your own identity in dialogue with the debates Jews have about it: is your identity religious? political? ethnic or racial? cultural? Who or what do you identify as? That is, distinguish what happens to be true of you, from what makes you be you. You *are* a Muslim; you happen to be from Alabama. You *are* pro-life, you happen to be African-American. You get the idea.