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Strengthening Research, Teaching and Mentorship

Recent changes to the doctoral curriculum

Kira Goldenberg

For the past few years, Smith College School for Social Work’s doctoral program has been phasing in an updated curriculum built around a deeper focus on research methods and mentoring while preserving its unique emphasis on clinical practice. When the new term starts this summer, all three cohorts of Ph.D. students will be participating in the revised—and revitalized—sequence of coursework.

“We wanted to be very thoughtful about how to retain the DNA of the program and yet create a forward-looking curriculum,” said Dean Marianne Yoshioka.

The program was reimagined with an eye toward making graduates more competitive in the academic marketplace, where research and teaching are often sought-after skills for tenure-track positions.

“It was a really thoughtful, intentional, inclusive process,” said Professor Ora Nakash, M.A., Ph.D., who chairs SSW’s doctoral program and led the initiative to rebuild it. “There was a lot of concern about losing some of the unique emphasis of clinical and psychodynamic theory, but now students know we strengthened that.”

To keep the clinical focus while bolstering the degree’s research, teaching and mentorship components, SSW added an extra term to the program—an extra five weeks of study in the third and final summer. There is also strengthened support for students’ required research internship through new agency collaborations and a revised comprehensive exam seminar. The Ph.D. Oversight Committee, which worked collectively throughout the process, also reimagined individual courses to weave research, clinical education and racial and social justice values more comprehensively throughout them.

“We focused on introducing research courses and research perspectives earlier on and really emphasized how clinical work and the research perspective could be integrated through the students’ placements and their interests,” said Professor Marsha Kline Pruett, M.S., M.S.L., Ph.D., ABPP, who served as associate dean of academic affairs during much of the revision.

The new Ph.D. structure even includes a new seminar to support students’ dissertation process, which they previously completed solo after finishing their on-campus coursework. Students also take a mentored teaching course that bolsters their pedagogical skills and trains them to take on teaching opportunities upon graduation.

“Overall, there’s huge satisfaction with the new program,” Nakash said. “It’s really aligning the doctoral program with the mission of the School,” she adds, including alignment with the five Core Principles implemented last year to center racial justice and intersectionality in all the School’s decisions and discussions.

Faculty hope that the increased research and teaching opportunities in the Ph.D. program will help graduates attain the academic and other leadership positions that will then bring SSW’s deeply clinical orientation to a broader audience of future social work students.

“The way we think and teach our practice at Smith will influence other social workers out there as more and more of our graduates are in teaching positions and tenure track positions at other universities,” Yoshioka says.