Click for updates Ethics and Social Welfare Professional Privilege, Ethics and Pedagogy (original) (raw)
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Encouraging critical reflections on privilege in social work and the human services
Critical reflection is promoted by many progressive social work writers as a process for facilitating practitioners' capacity to reflect upon their complicity in dominant power relations. However, the critical social work literature tends to focus attention on those who are disadvantaged, oppressed and excluded. Those who are privileged in relation to gender, class, race and sexuality etc are often ignored. Given that the flipside of oppression and social exclusion is privilege, the lack of critical reflection on the privileged side of social divisions allows members of dominant groups to reinforce their dominance. This article interrogates the concept of privilege and examines how it is internalised in the psyches of members of dominant groups. After exploring the potential to undo privilege from within, the article encourages social work educators to engage in critical reflections about privilege when teaching social work students about social injustice and oppression.
The Praxis of Privilege: How Social Workers Experience their Privilege
2017
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2018
A distinction between the deserving and undeserving has been in some respects a distinguishing, and in many others, divisive, feature of the social work profession. The apparent distinction has traditionally been drawn on the basis of ethical and moral appraisals of virtue and vice. This tradition has a much longer pedigree dating from antiquity in which considerations of personal desert were crucial, indeed decisive, in redistributive and retributive justice (Zaitchik 1977). Over the passage of time, moral authority has yielded more and more power to knowledge (Foucault, 1973). Rationality has superseded dogmatism, and the assessment of those eligible for welfare has been well honed. Although income and means tests form the official basis for distributing welfare, whether or not moral desert has been abandoned remains in question. However, how might desert be managed, if it does indeed continue to exert a powerful, albeit covert, influence on claims to state-provided or sponsored w...
Responsible use of Privilege in a Global Society
This paper presents a process through which its authors are seeking a deeper understanding of how Human Services professionals and educators make meaning of personal points of privilege. This paper emphasizes the methodological use of pre- and post- workshop questionnaires, observation of a group simulation exercise, and personal stories of times when participants did or did not act responsibly with various points of privilege. This is a synopsis of the study to date, providing the reader with an overview of the intents and methods undertaken. Preliminary results are offered to provide the reader with insight into the categorical themes that are emerging from the data.
Social Privilege and Accountability: Lessons from Family Therapy Educators
Journal of Feminist Family Therapy, 2013
This study focuses on the process by which white family therapy scholar activists learn over time to acknowledge and become accountable for their social privilege. Comparing two case studies, the authors analyze the complexities of micro-and macro-systems relative to interconnected social positions of race, class, gender, age, professional role, and sexual orientation. Implications for family therapy education, supervision, and practice are addressed.
Teaching Through Ethical Tensions: Between Social Justice, Authority and Professional Codes
Rethinking Reflection and Ethics for Teachers
This chapter focusses on how preservice teachers in particular can develop an ethical sensitivity to situations they find themselves in while at the same time responding critically to their unexamined assumptions and intuitions to ensure that their responses may be socially just. As the author argues, making moral decisions is not easy at the best of times and ethical dilemmas are strange things, not amenable to easy description or formulaic construction or resolution. The pedagogical value of a dilemma for teacher professional development is not necessarily to be found in sensational confrontation. Instead, every day and often very subtle or complex tensions and situations that can be easily overlooked, may provide instructive ethical stimuli. This chapter identifies key tensions that occur between teachers' sense of moral agency and values with a focus on questions of justice. Teachers struggle with questions of distributive justice and educational disadvantage including deficit thinking, resource allocation, streaming, stereotyping, dehumanising 'behaviour management' of student bodies, and encounters with power inequities and school hierarchies. Examples and analysis of preservice teachers are presented in order to explore different ways of understanding justice and modes of ethical authority. Forster argues that social justice is the 'bottom line' for teacher education and this chapter raises questions about justice and who is most deserving to explore different conceptualisations arising in preservice teacher ethical reflections. Making moral decisions is not easy at the best of times, and ethical dilemmas themselves are strange things; not amenable to easy description or formulaic construction. The pedagogical value of a dilemma for teacher professional development is not necessarily a measure of sensational confrontation; rather, mundane, every day and often very subtle or complex tensions and situations that can be easily overlooked as 'ethical' provide instructive stimuli (Lyons, 1990; Levinson & Fay, 2016). This chapter identifies key tensions that occur between teachers' sense of moral agency and values, the moral authority of the regulatory instrument and implementation