Social workers: agents of change or agents of oppression? (original) (raw)

This article presents our experiences teaching an undergraduate-level 'introduction to social work' course, and an undergraduate seniorlevel 'macro practice' course. Together, we hold a combination of over 20 years of experience teaching in social work, and speak candidly about our experiences at the medium-size US Mid Western University, where we are both employed. Firstly, we offer our personal accounts of how each of us has experienced student resistance to attempts to address issues of race/racism. We intentionally use a feminist approach in our work, which posits that researchers must acknowledge and position themselves first, before examining social problems. We next provide a brief overview of our institutional demographics and the main objective of each course. We then discuss the theoretical approaches that we draw from in our classroom work. Lastly, to understand how institutional racism impacts social work education and practice, we discuss ways in which race, class, and gender are implicated in students' receptivity to social justice concepts. This work adds to the literature on developing culturally competent social work practitioners who can truly become agents of change. During the 2015-2016 academic year, two United States' social work educators came together to discuss the role of the social work profession in improving the lives of persons who have been historically disenfranchised in the US. During the previous year, an increased use of social media documenting acts of police violence against racial and ethnic minorities, meant that the public began to witness these injustices firsthand. Among the public outcry, we, as social work educators, felt compelled to address this in our own classrooms, communities, and with our colleagues. The deaths of unarmed African-Americans such as Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, and, more recently, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, got us thinking about our responsibility to educate our students on the impact of race/racism in our own country. The sad reality is that during this writing process, we have had to add more names to the list of innocent Black women and men murdered by police. Each of us authors has our own standpoint, one Black, the other White, with similar working-class familial backgrounds, and a shared gender status. It was during our discussion that we began to engage in a reflective and critical dialog about our own role and that of the students we teach, within the larger system of US White supremacy.