Liberal Arts and the Development of Emotional Intelligence in Social Work Education

The paper considers the emotional development of students in initial qualifying social work education. We argue that this has been a much less emphasised area of the curriculum for almost two decades, which needs to be addressed in the college and practice curricula. The focus here is on college-based work using examples from liberal arts (LA) to facilitate students' emotional development. This includes work by the authors. We suggest that LA could be the basis of a particular module in first-year/foundation teaching with explicit learning outcomes and assessment but also in modules throughout qualifying programmes. We also think the ideas have relevance for learning outcomes at all levels of the Professional Capabilities Framework (PCF). We examine the concept of ‘emotional intelligence’ (EI) as a rationale for why LA appear to be effective in facilitating students' development. It is a connection which we think has significant potential. We have adopted here just one area of LA—an arts-based approach—to illustrate the potential for this type of education and argue that the process of working in this way can result in students developing emotionally as well as cognitively.