Graduate Teaching Assistant, McMaster University (Fall 2025)

Soc Work 1AA3 / So, You Think You Can Help: Introduction to Social Work 1

This introductory course explores the idea of ‘helping’ in a world shaped by a wide range of ongoing forms of violence and struggle. We will critically engage with various understandings and ideas about help, and how these different ideas influence who is defined as one who ‘helps’ and as one who ‘requires help,’ as well as what help looks like. We will spend time exploring our own assumptions about help and the issues and people we believe need help. In the process, we will examine the messy relationship between the common desire to be good and useful people and the ways in which our own lives are interwoven with the many inequalities of the world.

In these various ways, help is approached as a question rather than a fact. The desire to help and to make things better is a motivating factor for many wishing to enter the field of social work and other helping fields. It underlies all social work interventions; at all levels of intervention (e.g., individual, family, group, communities).

In this course, ideas, constructs, and theories foundational to social work practice, policy, education, and research are examined, and can also be readily taken into other fields, disciplines, and professions.