This fall, classes began for the Silver School of Social Work’s first full-semester, graduate-level study abroad program – fusing education, research, and practice – in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The program, which the McSilver Institute helped design and implement, enables second year MSW candidates to take the same required courses they are offered at NYU’s Washington Square campus and to do their field placements with the McSilver Institute’s community-based partners in Argentina.
Gisselle Pardo, LCSW, MPH, who leads the McSilver Institute’s global educational programs, explained, “Students have their field placements at a variety of agencies in Buenos Aires, ranging from one of the city’s oldest and largest public hospitals to a program that uses art as a therapeutic tool for children in poverty-impact communities, to a feminist grassroots organization supporting women and children living in Villa Paris.
Silver School MSW student Monika Estrada Guzman said, “As soon as I heard about the program, I got really excited about the opportunity to learn what social work is from a global perspective – how it’s defined and how it’s seen – and, as a Latina, to develop more of a clinical vocabulary in Spanish.”
Ms. Pardo added, “Within Latin America, Argentina has a complex and rich history around social movements, activism around social justice, and fighting for human rights. Students in the program are learning how this history impacted policy, practice, and communities, and they are getting an opportunity to work with organizations that are still doing a great deal of social justice activism today. Buenos Aires is also a cosmopolitan city, like New York, so it is somewhat familiar to our students but it also challenges them be in different context and culture.”