Educating the 21st Century Social Worker: Educating Against the Neoliberal Grain. CALL FOR PAPERS

[Jill Anderson]

Professional social work education can be fraught. Students continue to want to learn the skills that will enable them to feel competent when they enter the agencies and institutions where they will ply their trade. Educators strive to create curriculum and deliver programs that go beyond mere competency training. Those of us who situate ourselves within critical pedagogy insist upon infusing all that we teach with theoretical depth and conceptual complexity. We seek 

pedagogical approaches that entice students to see the urgency in developing a strong social analysis of the mission, the people with whom they work and what it is they think they are meant to do in their practice. Field instructors or mentors in field sites, where students are immersed in the more “hands-on” part of their education, may or may not share the theoretical perspectives that students are being taught in critical classrooms. When theory and practice
remain discrete categories, students can easily reject the abstractions of analysis in favour of the practicalities of seemingly more straightforward “doing”. Critics and proponents of international social work practica debate the benefits (or not) of sending students “away” to complete their field placement requirements. And overall, the universities, which house schools/departments/faculties of social work are increasingly shaped by the “all-pervasive language of neoliberal managerialism” (Davies, 2005, p. 1). Like Davies, we might ask ourselves what academic, intellectual work can look like within neoliberal regimes?

Neoliberal restructuring is transforming social work in dramatic ways. Workplaces are being markedly restructured and those of us who teach must wonder if these critical analytics are for naught, in light of the neoliberal, down-sized, competency-based workplaces that social workers now operate within. Some social work schools are moving - some more enthusiastically, some less - towards delivering graduate and undergraduate programs online. Demand for these
programs is strong and improved access is a valid reason to go this route. Pedagogically, however, there are questions about this move and what it will entail when it comes to covering difficult content that destabilizes and disrupts students’ comfort and certainty as budding social work practitioners.

Anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches to social work education and practice are well established in many social work programs. A few have developed explicit specialization in Indigenous social work. Educators of social work, whether educators of colour, Indigenous, or white, have varied and crucial insights into what it means to teach content around race, racialization, colonialism, culture and identity.

This edited book aims to address the issues that occupy critical social work educators in the current political context. We invite contributions from scholars in schools of social work or related departments who are prepared to submit a chapter for an edited book about social work pedagogy under neoliberal pressures. Contributions may consider the following themes (or others that are relevant):

• neoliberal restructuring of workplaces and the ramifications for social work education
• online education and the perils and/or possibilities of the virtual social work classroom
• teaching to resist the intensification of liberal values of choice, free will, and empowerment • activism– what can this look like now in the social work classroom?

• the impact of neoliberal discourses on particular areas of social work pedagogy and practice. Submissions might include the looming impact of competency standards; how racial exclusions are remade in the face of new configurations of racial capitalism
• what does it mean to Indigenize social work and the professional curriculum?

• ethics and ethical encounters
• what does it mean to educate for critical consciousness about forms of marginality (race, disability, other?) in a neoliberal context?
• how do we infuse social work education with the critical thinking on environmental issues from various disciplines?

Extended abstracts of 2-3 pages are welcome. Abstracts will be reviewed and accepted authors will be invited to submit a paper of approximately 20-25 words for inclusion in an edited book collection.

Submission timeline: Abstracts are due April 30, 2014. Please submit them to Dr. Donna Jeffery at the School of Social Work, University of Victoria ([e-mail]). University of Toronto Press has expressed an interest in publishing an edited collection based on this proposal.