Previous Page Next Page 
(c)  2025 Columbia University Press. All Rights reserved.

Generalist Practice: A Task-Centered Approach, Second Edition resources

Extracted Text (may have errors)

2 Introduction (Sheafor and Landon 1987). We believe that mastering one practice ap- proach, task-centered (TC), that has been applied across systems and with a large array of clients and problems produces competent gener- alist practitioners. TC has two additional advantages as the core ap- proach for generalist practice. It has been rigorously tested and found effective, and it is an open framework, which means that it can ac- commodate interventions drawn from other approaches. 1.1.0 The Generalist Perspective A useful description of the generalist worker is as follows: “The gener- alist social worker [has] the tools to work in various settings with a va- riety of client groups, addressing a range of personal and social prob- lems and using skills to intervene at practice levels ranging from the individual to the community” (Schatz, Jenkins, and Sheafor 1990:219). Some definitional confusion pertains to the distinction between gener- alist practice and generic knowledge. Generic knowledge is that which is common to all social workers. For example, all social workers share knowledge about values and human behavior. Although we touch on issues that are part of our generic knowledge base, like values and human development, the topic of this book is generalist practice. The roots of the generalist perspective have been traced to the in- ception of social work with the Charity Organization Society (COS) in the late 1800s (Sheafor and Landon 1987). The COS workers, as well as the settlement house workers who followed, were concerned not only with the plight of individuals but with the social conditions that produced those plights. In other words, both groups were concerned about the individual in the environment and the transactions between the two. Others (Schatz, Jenkins, and Sheafor 1990) trace the general- ist perspective to the Milford Conferences, which occurred during the 1920s. By that time a number of specialized social services had evolved and the conferences were established to identify the generic elements within social casework. The need to identify generic content for the purpose of establishing a professional identity was made more urgent by the merger of several social work professions into the National As- sociation of Social Workers in 1958.

Help

loading