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About SSA

Laura Epstein

The following is from the Charlotte Towle Award Presentation to Professor Emeritus, Laura Epstein, May 31, 1996

Laura Epstein"I am honored to present the Charlotte Towle award today to Laura Epstein whose teaching, research, and writing have shaped the character of SSA and social work over the last thirty years. We owe a great debt to her on several counts: Her collaborations with others produced a set ofempirically-based practice guidelines essential to students and professionals struggling under the time pressures to effect change in the lives of their clients.
Her writings continue to take up questions of great intellectual but still practical importance to the profession, with a directness and clarity that make even the most complex ideas accessible to a broad audience....from the inexperienced student to the most seasoned practitioner. She has always been ahead of her time..."cutting edge" we now call it... as she has from the outset dared to grapple with practice questions others had not yet formulated...for example:

One of her earliest contributions was an article published in Child Welfare in 1967.Here she laid out an approach to casework designed to prevent long-term placement for children in foster care and to secure either adoption or return to their own homes. The ultimate goal of this process was a permanent home for thechild within specified time frame. The casework steps, which were described in detail, contained the elements and language of what later became known as permanency planning...an approach that has been largely attributed to a project carried out in Oregon 8 years after Laura's publication that was an impetus for broad reforms in the delivery of child welfare services.

Another question she has addressed : can effective intervention be achieved within brief time limits for clients experiencing a complicated mix of personal and environmental problems?

By pursuing these issues, among others, Laura has in many ways kept SSA at the forefront of social work practice education and innovation.... And to think, that we (SSA and social work) were nearly deprived of her intellectual contributions, but for a series of "historical accidents" that ultimately guided her career path our way....

Laura grew up in Chicago, graduated from Hyde Park High School (with all the other smart but poor Hyde Park kids), and then majored in Psychology at the University of Chicago. She received her BA in 1934 when she was only 19 years old. She eagerly welcomed new challenges...and never considered that there might at some point be barriers to the pursuit of her educational goals. She hoped to become a clinical psychologist, but her path was unexpectedly thwarted when a prominent male faculty member in the Psychology dept. dissuaded her from applying, telling her that psychology wasn't a field for women and while there may be a few exceptions, Laura was not one of them.....he then advised her to go across the street and enroll in the School of Social Service Administration. Laura, crushed, bought a giant 1 lb. Hershey bar, ate the whole thing, and cried for several hours that day in a bathroom stall...she hasn't eaten a Hershey bar since.

A few months later she received a letter from The University saying she had been awarded a scholarship to the School of Social Service Administration. However, after discovering that a social worker was someone who went into poor neighborhoods and talked to unpleasant people and gave them relief....she knew she didn't want any part of that....She went to SSA and told Miss Edith Abbott, thank you for the scholarship, but I don't want to go into social work...I want to go intopsychology"

Miss Abbott, who revealed that she thought Laura was too young to go to school in social work, nevertheless made it crystal clear that as far as the University of Chicago was concerned the money that would pay for her tuition was coming from SSA, so if Laura chose not to go to SSA, then it would be nothing at all.....so Laura enrolled.....and, much to her surprise, discovered that there were a few strong activist women who had something to teach her and she had a great deal to learn.

A great career was born. Her education was firmly based in the social sciences and research .... and, she learned about compassionate listening in the casework sequence. But the philosophy of Charlotte Towle and other women faculty made a lasting impression on Laura. The perspective that clients were indeed victims of circumstance, entitled to respect and acceptance, and were in the best position to define their own needs, required the practitioner to close the status differential in the casework relationship.... Such a great impact did this philosophy have on Laura that it became a theme, I believe, at the heart of her thinking, professional writing, and teaching.

After graduation from SSA, Laura, who had become a social activist, had some trouble finding appropriate agency positions during the WW II years and found herself in jobs as a switchboard operator and salesclerk in a dress shop.... These jobs didn't last long, however, since she didn't have quite the right skills to succeed....particularly in sales.... Laura was never reluctant to tell a customer that the dress she was trying to squeeze into was simply too small. Luckily, new opportunities surfaced and she was hired as a wage and price economist on the National War Labor Board, and then as Director of Social Service Employees Union of the CIO, positions that allowed her to become active in the labor movement.

Finally in the early 1950's she returned to social work as a supervisor at Traveler's Aid Society of Metropolitan Chicago, where she also became a field instructor for Loyola and SSA. Her reconnection with professional education continued in the early 1960's as she became Director of Social Work Education for Child and Family Services.
It was during this decade that SSA began to experience dramatically increasing enrollments. Laura was hired in 1967 as a faculty field instructor, part of the School's strategy to deal with the vast number of students. In the next 9 years, Dean Harold Richman promoted Laura to Full Professor (this was accomplished, by the way, without her having acquired a doctorate...At the time she had been interested in applying- just after WWII - SSA was giving preference to men in admission decisions and the dean, who I will not identify, refused to give her an application to the Ph.D. program. Given her earlier experience in the psychology dept., Laura decided not to push it and never did pursue a Ph.D.)

Academia provided ways of giving an intellectual framework to what she had been doing as a caseworker and supported her interest in research. Shortly after she arrived, she was introduced to Bill Reid, as someone who shared her interest in short- term intervention, and together they developed the task-centered model of casework practice.

Their first book, Task Centered Casework published in 1972, set forth the model distinguished by: its well articulated guidelines for a systematic approach to brief, time-limited treatment a focus on problems of high interest to the client and on providing the kinds of help clients desire ....placing the social worker and the client on more equal footing action-based problem-solving an explicit linking of casework and research: first, by calling on the practitioner to make use of empirical knowledge in practice and to systematically evaluate the outcomes of problem solving efforts, and second, by designing the model in a way so that its operations and outcomes could be systematically evaluated and the model revised. Finally, the model provided a barebones framework upon which a range of theories could be hung. This meant that adaptations could be easily developed for use by practitioners with diverse orientations.

Laura taught 15 generations of master's and doctoral students to combine research and practice, and many more when you count students she has continued to work with even after her retirement. Laura preferred students who had little or no practice experience, who were open to nonmainstream ideas about practice, and who were willing to take risks. These students served as practitioners in the Task-Centered Services Project, a 10 year effort to research the effectiveness of the task-centered approach in a variety of settings through their field placements.

In fact, these students were a visible presence in the School: They were never seen without their tape recorders (they taped all their sessions with clients) and they were often in the building when other students were in the field. Field placement activities were largely determined by client availability; Laura's students were as likely to interview clients at night or on weekends, as during conventional work hours. Laura relied on doctoral students, in particular Lester Brown, RonRooney, and Eleanor Tolson, to supervise field placements....these same doctoral students played a major role in the dissemination of the model nationally and even internationally, along with numerous master's students who had been trained in the approach. Their efforts resulted in doctoral dissertations, articles and books, some of which have been translated into other languages, and speaking engagements in the US and abroad. It was in these ways that the central ideas of the task-centered approach infiltrated and continue to influence practice. Here at home, they form the basis of SSA's Core practice sequence that all students takein their first year of the program.
Over time the model has been fine-tuned to take into account the changing array of political, organizational, and economic constraints faced by social work practitioners--Laura's most recent version of the approach, articulated in Brief Treatment: Another Look at the Task-Centered Approach addresses factors in the practice environment and lives of clients that demand creative adaptations of the original model.

And, Laura - she moved on, too. Even while completing her book published in 1992, she turned to more philosophical issues in practice. Understanding the economic, social and political factors that gave rise to the therapeutic idea in social work became a top priority. She's been working on producing a picture of the controlling ideas in clinical social work and how they relate to the needs of culture, the state, and life in our times. She also has an article published in the most recent issue Social Work Research. This piece addresses the relevance today of the practitioner-as-researcher movement. It also examines the proper place of empirical knowledge for those helping clients address problems in a more complicated and dangerous world....and a world with a less than hospitable serviceenvironment.

Now, as far as personal attributes go, I thought for awhile about how to best capture her character in a word, but when it came down to it, I couldn't decide between two: So the first one is for the art connoisseur and that word is "minimalist." The second one is for the fashion-conscious and that word is "marimeko." Both words suggest to me someone marked by the unusual ability to dissect complexity into its most fundamental components, someone who is straightforward and bold, clear, and, yes, colorful, and sometimes even flamboyant...as some of you may know from your own encounters with her.

As a student of Laura's 20 years ago and still a student of hers today, I prize these characteristics above all others. I, like many of her students, have benefitted greatly from her counsel in my own career. Her critical feedback on my papers and performance, detailed and cutting and right to the point, I seek out and greatly value..... And I say this, even after she suggested that I take a 30 page paper I had spent months working on and move nearly the entire text to an appendix, in order to make room for a much more thoughtful and theoretical article....and I was grateful for that. For she is master of the critique, but she applies a gentle hand and pairs it with a great deal of encouragement and humor......

And so, Laura, my mentor, colleague, and dear friend, it is with enormous respect and affection that we present you with the Charlotte Towle medal ---

This award, unlike your career, is no historical accident."

Tina L. Rzepnicki
May 31, 1996