Assignment Content Directions

Assignment Content Directions

Assignment One: Personal Integration Paper – Without self-understanding of their own spiritual journeys, social work students cannot hope to address such issues with clients. For example, what defines your own spirituality and/or religious experience? Where does this come from? In what ways are your spirituality and/or religious experience relevant to and an influence for your developing role as a social work professional?

This exercise is a personal reflection that addresses how students’ own spiritual development impacts their work with clients. Students should exhibit knowledge of how one's values, attitudes, beliefs, emotions, affect, thinking, behavior, relationships, and past experiences may hamper or strengthen his or her work with clients.

This self-reflection assignment will include a discussion of the following six points:

 As you think about your religious orientation, define your present spiritual/religious orientation.

 What are the major tenets, values, and principles of your current religious or spiritual affiliation?

 How has your spiritual orientation changed since your upbringing? Why has it changed? What events or experiences helped to change you?

 How might your spiritual/religious orientation, values, and principles, create difficulties or tension in your relationship with clients?

 How might your spiritual/religious orientation, values, and principles enhance your relationship with clients?

 How might this personal reflection about your current spiritual/religious orientation enhance your professional growth? For example, how might you as a practitioner value and respect religious diversity, uphold client self-determination, or respectfully maintain personal and profession integrity while representing clinical, social, or ethical perspectives that differ from the client.

This typewritten paper must be double-spaced, neat, contain grammatically correct language and be free of spelling errors. If references are cited, they must conform to APA (7th edition) format. Internet references/articles are not acceptable unless they are online professional journal articles or are related to the online information generated by the religious institution. However, internet references generated from religious institutions websites are limited to two. Excluding the title and reference pages, this five-page assignmentmay be written in the first-person voice