Exploring Redundancy in SocialWork Education

The issue of redundancy has not been well explored in the social work curriculum. The Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) (CSWE, 2001) requires redundancy in the form of integration of material across content areas and addresses redundancy vertically between levels of education and year of program. Furthermore, research and theory support the notion that various types of redundancy produce educational benefits.This paper uniquely uses MSW students to track instances of redundancy over their first year of study and distinguishes between helpful and unhelpful redundancy. It presents both the study results and a description of the study process so that other schools may use or adapt it.