Academic Spotlight: Schools of Water Tower Campus
Loyola Neighborhood News: Water Tower Campus - V3, I3
Loyola’s Water Tower Campus offers a wealth of particularly exciting opportunities for the entire Loyola community, marrying the ideals of the Jesuit educational tradition with the incomparable experience of learning and living in a Midwestern metropolis.
The Schools of Education, Law, and Social Work are all housed at the Water Tower Campus, providing their students, staff, faculty, and alumni with a variety of means to experience a truly transformative education.
Loyola’s School of Education employs faculty and staff dedicated the helping students gain the necessary professional education and experience to become educators. In accordance with Loyola’s mission, the School of Education prepares their students to lead extraordinary lives, who as future educators will do the same.
Housed at the Water Tower Campus, this school offers a variety of undergraduate, graduate, certification, and special academic programs for Loyola students. In addition, the curriculum, concentrations, and course offerings in the School of Education aim to reflect the dynamic and diverse nature of educational policies and practices, such as bilingual education and ESL endorsements.
The School of Education has also formed and sustained numerous partnerships with schools around the city, whether in the Chicago Public Schools district or at various private institutions, in order to give Loyola students the chance to be immersed within a challenging and exciting educational center. During clinical placements, School of Education students are assigned to observe, research, and eventually, teach in a classroom setting at a Chicago school. This direct engagement with the surrounding educational community grants an exceptional experience to Loyola students.
The location of the School of Law in a large metropolis, such as downtown Chicago, allows students to gain greater insight to the legal issues and challenges of urban areas. Additionally, students are granted access to a wealth of opportunities for professional experience, ranging from laudable law firms to noteworthy non-profits.
Established in 1908, this school has both Masters- and Doctorate-level programs available for students looking for an education that will provide a professional education in preparation of the practice of law. Also, the school offers a number of fellowships available to both prospective and current law students.
As featured in the Community Engagement Report, delivered by the Department of Community Relations in 2009, the School of Law also provides a number of services to the surrounding Chicago community. The pro-bono services include programs with local middle and high schools, cooperation with neighborhood law organizations, and the sustained operation of five different free legal clinics to low-income clients.
In addition, Loyola law students staff Life After Innocence, a program under the direction of Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence Laura Caldwell that provides free legal aid to individuals who were wrongfully convicted of a crime, helping them begin their return to normalcy.
Loyola’s School of Social Work is considered to be the largest clinical program in the Midwest. In accordance with the Jesuit value of service, social work students are directly involved in serving the community of Chicago.
All programs in the school, from Bachelor to Doctorate, emphasize internship and fieldwork as not only supplementary, but essential to complement the social work curriculum. Students are placed direct service with the external community, confronting major social challenges that Chicago residents must face every day.
The School of Social Work encourages research in a vast spectrum of issues, whether domestic violence, childcare, gerontology, or otherwise, unique to Chicago’s environment. Simultaneously, the school allows students to experience these issues on both personal and public levels, exposing them not only direct engagement and applied practice with need-seeking individuals, but also informing students about the advocacy needed to change social policy.
Additionally, the students of the School of Social Work continue to publish Praxis, one of the only student-published social work journals in the country
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Stay tuned for our next issue where we will highlight the Schools of Communication, Business Administration, and Continuing and Professional Studies, all housed at the Water Tower Campus.
