Social Activism in Social Work Education: A Labor Dispute as a Learning Experience (original) (raw)
Related papers
Towards an Issue-based Politics in Social Work Education
Global Social Work Education: Crossing borders and blurring boundaries: IASSW, (2013) , 2013
This chapter seek to articulate a ‘new politics’ for social work based on object oriented issues. This is derived from a critique of public statements and potential material objects in confronting injustice and inequality in the Global Agenda, 2012. Social work explicitly adopts justice as a normative value. This means it exhorts social workers to take an ethical and political stance but it does not necessarily define how its commitments might be mobilised. Students come to social work motivated by change: they want to make a difference but the crucial question is ‘how’. But we also need to understand the role that issues play in involving social workers and their public's in political activation. In this chapter we argue that the displacement of politics to a global forum, in which a cross-national alliance of social workers can hold an international institution to account, requires a concrete set of controversies over which mobilisation tactics can be configured. So we wish to conceive of public involvement in politics, by social work students and their educators as being occasioned by, and providing a way to settle, controversies that existing institutions are unable to resolve.
Occupying Social Work: Unpacking the Social Work/Activist Divide.
We are interested in how social work and activism fit, connect and contradict each other. As academics, activists and social workers, we consistently grapple with the tensions between these realms and how we configure ourselves and our work into these spaces. This pilot project was initially undertaken by Emma, an undergraduate social work student, under the supervision of May, an assistant professor of social work, as a means of blending our diverse identities and subject positions while allowing us to analyze the relationships between social work and activism. We were able to use our own different roles and ideas as a jumping off point that led to Emma interviewing eight other people (who identified, variously, as social workers and/or activists), allowing for a rich and multifarious conversation to emerge. While neither social work nor activism nor any other form of protest and resistance can single-handedly engender utopia, this research has confirmed what our lived experiences have suggested: that individual connections, communities, social movements, educational models and radical alternatives must continue an engaged dialogue in order to constructively co-exist.
Occupying Social Work: Unpacking Connections and Contradictions in the Social Work/Activist Divide
Journal of Critical Anti Oppressive Social Inquiry, 2014
We are interested in how social work and activism fit, connect and contradict each other. As academics, activists and social workers, we consistently grapple with the tensions between these realms and how we configure ourselves and our work into these spaces. This pilot project was initially undertaken by Emma, an undergraduate social work student, under the supervision of May, an assistant professor of social work, as a means of blending our diverse identities and subject positions while allowing us to analyze the relationships between social work and activism. We were able to use our own different roles and ideas as a jumping off point that led to Emma interviewing eight other people (who identified, variously, as social workers and/or activists), allowing for a rich and multifarious conversation to emerge. While neither social work nor activism nor any other form of protest and resistance can single-handedly engender utopia, this research has confirmed what our lived experiences have suggested: that individual connections, communities, social movements, educational models and radical alternatives must continue an engaged dialogue in order to constructively co-exist.
Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, 2016
In the context of service restructuring that has gravely impacted quality of life for social workers and the people with whom they work, this paper considers the ways that social work education can better support social justice-based social work practices in urban communities in Canada. The paper’s authors attended a fall 2013 Ryerson University forum that brought together critical social work educators and community-based activist social workers struggling to bring social justice-based practices to their work within restructured social services. Examples of social service restructuring include cuts to services, labour intensification, and increased managerialism, processes known as neoliberalism that have shifted discourses away from quality of life toward a focus on economic markers and efficiencies. The purpose of our forum was to explore ways in which social work curricula and pedagogical practices can be challenged and redefined in order to better support those efforts by socia...
Ethics and Social Welfare, 2020
Starting from the idea that many social work professors exceed the traditionally defined 'service' requirements of their university and are actively involved in social change and justice initiatives, this article aims at critically reflecting upon our own experiences as three social work educators. In the article, we address the question of how social engagement may influence the development of our social work ethical consciousness. If a growing body of literature is available around social work education, teaching and ethical learning and decision-making of social work students, little is yet known about how educators articulate those processes in the context of their work. To achieve this task, we have each undertaken an autoethnographic reflection where we describe one of the most significant situations in the development of our ethical consciousness and examine how they contributed to challenging our pre-existing ethical frameworks in social work. We conclude by discussing how to develop adaptive and pluralistic anti-oppressive ethical frameworks for social work research, teaching, practice and activism.
Teaching social work students against the grain: negotiating the constraints and possibilities
Higher Education Research & Development
Students who have followed routes to Western universities other than the 'traditional' one-that is, an uninterrupted, linear path from school to universityface greater challenges to their democratic participation in higher education than their 'traditional' counterparts. Until recently, universities have predominantly expected students with diverse entry points to assimilate into existing curricula and academic modes of operating. Such expectation, when combined with reductionist managerial accountability, has largely marginalised non-traditional students. This paper reports on a project which aimed to reverse this marginalisation in an Australian Bachelor of Social Work degree. It is argued that students from diverse linguistic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, having greater challenges in negotiating privileged academic and discipline literacies, are better served pedagogically by curriculum design that resonates with their lifeworlds and makes tacit assumptions in university literacies explicit. Using practitioner action research in a partnership between a social work and an academic language and learning academic, pedagogic approaches that utilised students' literacy practices as assets for learning were enacted over two research cycles. The possibilities and constraints that emerged to support students' learning and more equitable participation were examined. Findings from student questionnaires and focus groups, interviews with the educators and the researcher's field journal suggest that, with explicit attention to the discourses (sayings), activities (doings) and social relationships (relatings) which infuse the complex practice architectures of university classrooms, it is possible, even under current preoccupations with measurements and budget constraints, to signal key points of negotiation for pedagogic change to respond more inclusively and equitably to contemporary university students.
2013
Social work is a degree and an academic discipline that seeks to improve the and well- being of an individual, group, or community by intervening through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice, and teaching on behalf of those afflicted with any real or perceived social injustices and violations of their Social workers are organized into local, national, continental and international professional civil liberties and human rights. bodies. It is an interdisciplinary field which includes theories from economics, education, sociology, law, politics, medicine, philosophy, anthropology, engineering and psychology.
Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 2017
The purpose of this article is to describe student perceptions of their experiences around social justice discussions in the social work classroom through a qualitative, grounded theory framework. Student responses from a qualitative section of a survey were analyzed and sorted into three categories: perceived discrimination, heightened self-awareness/self-assessment, and future social work practice. Each of these categories was derived from comparable multiple themes stemming from the student responses. A conceptual model resulting from the analysis suggests that students who shared experiences of perceived discrimination during classroom discussions could develop an enhanced self-awareness, which would result in an added empathy for clients in their future social work practice. Suggestions for teaching strategies and directions for future research are also discussed.