Classroom Without Walls is an innovative program designed to foster learning opportunities between current students, faculty and community members. The program covers your tuition for nine (9) free credits for community learners.
The Classroom Without Walls (CWW) program is free to community learners not affiliated with Case Western Reserve University. The CWW course that community learners are accepted to is offered at no cost to the community learner. If you are an alum of the Mandel School, you will pay a reduced rate of $500 per credit hour. If you are an employee of CWRU, you will utilize the employee tuition waiver benefit.
See the course options and descriptions below.
SASS 405: Nonprofit Ethics and Professionalism (3 Credits)
With Zulma Zabala – President and CEO of East End Neighborhood House; Grassroot Leader; public speaker regarding neighborhood work, advocacy and collectivism
This course is an application of ethical frameworks and analysis to nonprofit organizations. Using cases and essays, the course will help nonprofit managers become better equipped to address ethical problems and dilemmas in their work in the following areas: ethics of boards, ethics and leadership, ethics and organizational culture, professional ethics, and ethics and fundraising.
SASS 500: Operationalizing Antiracism for Everyday Impact (3 Credits)
With Mark L. Joseph – Leona Bevis/Marguerite Haynam Professor in Community Development; Founding Director, National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities; Faculty Associate, Center on Poverty and Community Development
With Jennifer A. King – Co-Director, Center on Trauma and Adversity
Gain advanced skill-building experience that equips you with the tools, techniques and practices for effective antiracism. This course approaches antiracism as “a purposeful way of seeing and being in the world in order to transform it” (Lerner, 2021). Be equipped for a career disrupting racism in all its forms and manifestations at the internalized/intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional and system level. This course focuses on issues of race and racism in the U.S. context, but the antiracist concepts and skills can be applied globally.
SASS 523: Introduction to Neuroscience in Social Work Practice (1 Credit)
With J. Richard Romaniuk – Lecturer
This one-credit course provides an introduction to cognitive neuroscience principles useful in social work practice. Class discussion will focus on how events of the physical world may affect an individual's perception, mental functioning and behavior, as an individual and as a member of the community. Information gained in this course will help students to understand the complexity of the human adult nervous system in health and disability, including trauma and addiction as well as the role of neural processing in cognitive interventions.
SASS 500: LGBTQIA2S Health and Wellbeing (1 Credit)
With Dana Prince – Associate Professor
This course will introduce a variety of issues facing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and Two-Spirit (LGBTQIA2S+) individuals and communities at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels. We will begin with an examination of historical and contemporary movements for LGBTQIA2S+ liberation and equity, and understand how these histories inform the current landscape of key policies, issues, trends and dilemmas pertaining to LGBTQIA2S+ people and communities. We will examine and analyze factors that promote, inhibit and otherwise influence the implementation of social policy and explore the procedures and techniques used by LGBTQIA2S+ people and communities, social workers and social agencies to bring about social change. Then we will examine processes and factors related to LGBTQIA2S+ health and wellbeing including the process of coming out, social stigma, family acceptance, chosen family and queer kinship, sexuality and relationships, community organizing, impact of policies, and ways to work towards resistance and resilience.
SASS 500: Operationalizing Antiracism for Everyday Impact (3 Credits)
With Mark L. Joseph – Leona Bevis/Marguerite Haynam Professor in Community Development; Founding Director, National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities; Faculty Associate, Center on Poverty and Community Development
With Jennifer A. King – Co-Director, Center on Trauma and Adversity
Gain advanced skill-building experience that equips you with the tools, techniques and practices for effective antiracism. This course approaches antiracism as “a purposeful way of seeing and being in the world in order to transform it” (Lerner, 2021). Be equipped for a career disrupting racism in all its forms and manifestations at the internalized/intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional and system level. This course focuses on issues of race and racism in the U.S. context, but the antiracist concepts and skills can be applied globally.
SASS 518: Social Work with Death, Grief and Loss (3 Credits)
With Michaela Jackson-Smith
This course focuses on the concept of death and related topics from a social work perspective. Such topics include the role of death in American culture, the dying process and its institutions, assessment and intervention strategies, life span and family life considerations, and end-of-life decisions. The course provides both theoretical and experiential exposure to the dying process as it relates to self, the dying person and the bereaved. Additionally, other forms of loss such as divorce, independence and physical/cognitive functioning will be explored. Students will gain insight into intervening with those experiencing loss and grief across the life course, including those terminally ill and those clients dealing with difficult life-and-death decisions regarding loved ones.
Classroom Without Walls community learners will gain skills to enhance their careers, lives and communities.
Please email mandelschool@case.edu with any questions about the program.
"I highly recommend to my fellow alums participating in the Operationalizing Antiracism for Everyday Impact course. As social workers and nonprofit practitioners, addressing racism is mission critical to making social change on the issues we pour ourselves into. It can be daunting though, to know where to start or to sustain the energy needed for the long haul. This course provides a comprehensive framework to address the multiple ways in which racism manifests, and to also take care of our wellbeing as advocates. It gently confronted me with my own growing edges, and the dedicated and thoughtful instructors and classmates provided a community to workshop ideas to apply to my work and life. I can’t recommend enough engaging in this experience!"
— Adrian Griffin (MNO ’20, MSW)