Practices of exclusion and injustices within social work education

Abstract

Despite being a major influence, there are few studies investigating the impact of accreditation on the social justice remit of social work education. This article is guided by two questions: What are the social justice responsibilities of professional associations regulating social work education via accreditation? and What contribution can institutional ethnography make to understanding and change in this area? Drawing on a data-subset from a larger institutional ethnography, selected narratives of two informants, a social work student and a social work lecturer, are discussed. These narratives reveal how key documents of the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) used to re-accredit social work courses influence how the study and work of the informants happens. Analysis of the narratives and documents bring the textually organised process of the re-accreditation of social work programmes into view. While this article reports on an Australian context, the issues raised concerning social injustice, epistemological equity and the implicit curriculum are relevant for social work education across many parts of the world. The contribution of this article is to recommend institutional ethnography as a research approach to generate understanding and transformation of organisations with social justice objectives, to redress exclusion and injustice.

Keywords:

• Social work education
• social justice
• institutional ethnography
• accreditation
• Nancy Fraser
• professional associations
• epistemological equity
• implicit curriculum