West Virginia University, in collaboration with An Giang University, and the Pacific Links Foundation, is celebrating 10 years of helping to build the intellectual infrastructure of social work in Vietnam through its Summer Institute on Social Work and Community Health Services this summer. The institute is held from May 25 to June 10.

Attendance at the institute is expected to be more than 100. After the conference, the rector of An Giang University will visit WVU with 10 high school students who will be attending a 4-H camp sponsored by University Extension Services. Attendance at this camp is an outgrowth of the Summer Institute.

Offering such an institute, organizers say, supports education for social service workers who may lack the specialized training necessary for their jobs..

“They have great hearts, but they could benefit from additional skills,” said Neal Newfield, associate professor in the WVU School of Social Work and organizer of the institute.. “They may already be practicing social work, but they’re not going to be able to go back to school and get a degree. But we can help their skills.”

Newfield, along with Susan Newfield, associate professor at the School of Nursing and chair of Family and Community Health at WVU, and Jim Keim of the Southeast Asia Children’s Project made a 10-year commitment to teach social work in Vietnam. The effort has also been supported by the efforts of others from WVU including School of Social Work professors Patricia Chase, Hae Jung Kim, Denis Scott from WVU Extension Service, and Julian Nguyen, interim program coordinator for University College Advising at WVU.

Over the two and a half weeks of the workshops, WVU faculty and other volunteers from Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Loa, and Vietnam will teach workshops ranging from child development, family therapy, and human trafficking, to program planning. Professors of social work, practicing social workers, and social work students from across Vietnam travel to theinstitute. Some participants travel for two days to attend the workshops and participants from Cambodia and Lao have not been uncommon.

This institute is taught in tandem with the School of Social Work’s Vietnam social work elective. Students enrolled in this course spend a month in Vietnam and Cambodia, participate in the sponsored Social Work Institute and get a view of a developing country few tourists get while receiving 100 service hours through the Office of Civic Engagement.

-WVU-

dr/05/12/2015

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