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ABSTRACT
In social work education there have been very few attempts to empirically capture and measure how professional training programmes prepare students to work with ‘race’ equality and cultural diversity issues. This paper interrogates the experiences and outcomes of anti-racist social work education and evaluates the pedagogic relevance and practice utility of teaching social work students about ‘race’, racism and anti-racism. The data presented in this paper suggests that it is possible to discover the situated experiences of learning about anti-racism and measure how this teaching can affect and lead to knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The triangulated mixed methods evidence presented in this paper combines nomothetic and idiographic approaches with quantitative data for a matched pair sample of 36 social work students and uses non-parametric statistical tests to measure at two time intervals (before and after teaching); knowledge, skills and attitudinal change. The paper explores how anti-racist social work education enables students to move from ‘magical consciousness’, where racism and racial oppression is invisible and thereby left unchallenged and maintained, to more critical and reflexive level of awareness where it is named, challenged and no longer shrouded in a culture of professional denial and silencing.
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Notes on contributors
Sukhwinder Singh
Sukhwinder Singh completed his Doctor of Social Work studies at the University of Sussex in 2014 and works in the UK and East Africa. He is the Professional Practice lead for Social Work at the Red Cross Society in Uganda and leads on their UK health partnership and child protection work in West Nile. Sukhwinder is an experienced social work educator and his interest in anti-racism is grounded in frontline practice at the Frantz Fanon Centre for Mental Health, Nottingham Black Initiative and the the Birmingham NHS Asian Services Team. He recognises the transformative potential and emancipatory nature of critical learning and has an academic interest in how anti-racist social work education shapes and develops preparedness for professional practice. Sukhwinder is currently working on a 3 year project with members of the British Association of Social Workers and the National Association of Social Workers of Uganda in developing enhanced safeguarding standards for humanitarian organisations and practitioners in West Nile.