Not Just Play ― Summer Camp and the Profession of Social Work

Camps often provide children with a first taste of independence and freedom from the restrictions of home and school, while offering a milieu full of opportunities for psychosocial development, creative interaction, and mutual aid. Enduring friendships often grow in the close-knit cabin groups and age cohorts, and professionally guided camps offer a nearly unique setting for strengths-based development in a nurturing environment. Though summer camps have provided social workers and future social workers with educational, practice, research, and theory-development opportunities as they direct, staff, attend, and provide supervision in these surroundings, the field has received limited scholarly attention. Not Just Play, the only book written in many decades that focuses on the relationship between social work and the summer camp movement, provides a comprehensive treatment of this underappreciated area of practice. In addition to updating their knowledge in the area, social workers and camp professionals will benefit from the authors' consideration of the many advantages and connections explored in the volume, which includes case vignettes alongside core scholarly research. In addition to the more extended pieces, numerous quotations gathered from interviews and online questionnaires are incorporated into the text, many from well-known social workers citing the influence of their camp experiences. As a whole, the resource offers readers a multifaceted examination of social work and summer camp that broadens their professional and scholarly perspective.

Meryl Nadel, DSW, ACSW, LCSW, is Professor of Social Work at Iona College. She has taught across the undergraduate social work curriculum for 22 years and developed courses utilizing innovative modalities. Her research interests include social welfare history, environmental justice, service learning, and summer camp as a field of practice.

Susan Scher, MSSA, LCSW, is Professor Emeritus of Social Work at Ramapo College of New Jersey. As a practicing social worker and administrator, she worked primarily with children and in the health care system. As a social work educator, she taught primarily in undergraduate programs and directed the field education component. Summer camping was a part of her early life for almost twenty years, though she was reintroduced to camping and its relation to social work living in an area with many camps.