Unsettling reflexivity and critical race pedagogy in social work education: narratives from social work students

ABSTRACT

Recognizing and dismantling structural racism is at the core of the National Association of Social Work’s (NASW) Code of Ethics and is also one of the Social Work Grand Challenges to tackle. Although increasing scholarly research has examined critical reflexive approaches to incorporate in the training of prospective anti-racist social work practitioners, scholars, and educators, limited research has examined narratives from social work students grappling with positionality and power structures of the profession. This article suggests unsettling reflexivity as a critical race pedagogy tool to disrupt and contest systems of power in social work education by presenting four critical autoethnographic narratives of graduate and doctoral social work students. Implications and recommendations to prioritize a pedagogy of relationality and discomfort for social work education are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social work education
• critical race pedagogy
• unsettling reflexivity
• autoethnography
• social justice

Introduction

Social work has historically been characterized as a ‘helping’ profession concerned with the pursuit of social justice and meeting the needs of vulnerable communities. As a result of including social justice as a core value of the profession, social workers are mandated to uphold the ethical principle of challenging social injustice and understand the role of environmental factors that shape individuals’ inequitable conditions (NASW, 2017). Social work scholars, researchers, and practitioners have contested multiple definitions and theories of social justice (Austin et al., 2013; Rawls, 2009). Relevant frameworks have focused primarily with equal access to distribution of resources and opportunities (distributive), equal inclusion in fair democratic processes to decision-making (procedural), equal recognition of cultural and social identity groups (recognition), equal inclusion of belonging (political), and structural redistribution of resources and rights that promote equity (structural) (Bent-Goodley & Hopps, 2017; Finn, 2020; Reisch & Andrews, 2014). While these frameworks complicates the profession’s efforts to operationalize social justice in social work training, research, and practice, these contested definitions can serve as a compass to adopt anti-oppressive frameworks and articulate multiple and distinct dimensions of justice including equal opportunity and access, equity, fair play, social action, multiculturalism, and human rights (Austin et al., 2013; Morgaine, 2014). Achieving social justice requires us to interrogate and disrupt the ways as individuals, institutions, and even the profession have aligned and continue to align with oppressive systems of injustice rooted in white supremacy, colonialism, and neoliberalism (Almeida et al., 2019; Gregory, 2020; Parada, 2017). These include but are not limited to the profession’s role in segregated settlement houses and social services, the removal, relocation, and genocide of indigenous communities, the incarceration of Japanese Americans, and the continued state-sanctioned violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities (Delgado, 2020; Haley, 2020; Lasch-Quinn, 2017; Thibeault & Spencer, 2019).

In addition to holding these contradictions within social work research and practice, social work education is also an arena of continuous struggle. Research has increasingly interrogated the role of social work training in reinforcing oppressive forms of power by overemphasizing biomedical and psychodynamic approaches that have failed to address and dismantle colonial and racist structures that reproduce health inequities (Martinez & Fleck-Henderson, 2014; Varghese, 2016). For example, prominent social work founder Mary Richmond presented ‘social diagnosis’ as key biomedical frameworks that served as the foundation of the profession’s approach to understand social illness and individuals’ interactions with environments (Richmond, 2017). This framework persists in social work practice and training which leaves out a critical understanding and acknowledgement of the role of systems in maintaining structural inequities and racism (Lee & Rasmussen, 2019). Although social work training includes an emphasis on social determinants of health to understand individuals’ in their environment, particularly in social care and health care delivery (de Saxe Zerden et al., 2020), dominant biomedical hegemonic diagnostic models such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (Marecek & Gavey, 2013), perpetuates misbeliefs that individual choice, responsibility, self-improvement, and self-care are associated with positive health outcomes (Chen, 2013). These pathologizing and decontextualized approaches that fail to address the social and political contexts in which people live are reflected in the mainstreaming of recovery (Rose & Hughes, 2018), the increasing reduced provision of social welfare services and supports (Baines, 2019), and efficiency-based models such as evidence-based practice that promotes control by allowing organizations to manage, implement, and monitor practitioners using audits and measures (Webb, 2001). As a response, social workers have proposed critical clinical social work approaches rooted in critical theory to resist neoliberal forces and negotiate the profession’s values (Brown, 2021). Additionally, scholars across fields such as medical health sciences and public health are increasingly identifying structural forces such as racism as a settler colonial project that continues to maintain racial hierarchies affording privileges to dominant groups and that is necessary to examine in-depth in research (Bailey et al., 2017; Boyd et al., 2020).

Moreover, social work training programs are establishing ‘hidden curriculums’ that reflect neoliberal market pressures of privileging mainstream narratives of social justice and thus hindering the extent to which social justice is integrated across social work coursework and field education (Bhuyan et al., 2017; Haley, 2020; Hanesworth, 2017). For example, social work programs are increasingly shaped by market values that prioritize consumerism, managerialism, financialization, and formal establishment of profit where curricula are designed to cater specific ‘needs’ of the market and social work students become tuition paying commodities (Abramovitz & Zelnick, 2015; Bhuyan et al., 2017; Dominelli, 2010). As a result, social work education, practice, and research have experienced a historical shift from focusing on social justice-driven radical collective action and structural changes, to individual practices to support clients to adapt (Abramovitz & Zelnick, 2018; Jani & Reisch, 2011; Reisch & Andrews, 2014). Moreover, social work education and training have reinforced a disproportionate attention to individual symptom management and control ignoring structural determinants of oppression by placing an exceeding emphasis on colorblind, colonial and Eurocentric biomedical and psychological approaches to clinical practice that maintain inequitable structures of power and exacerbate health inequities in oppressed communities including Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) (Bartoli et al., 2015; Beck, 2019). In order to dismantle systemic forms of racism and oppression, it is imperative to articulate counternarratives and wrestle with theories, knowledge, and culture embedded in social work education that maintain white supremacy and reproduce Euro-centric, white cis-male, anti-Black colonial ideologies (Beck, 2019; Edmonds-Cady & Wingfield, 2017; Reisch, 2019).

Critical autoethnography and unsettling reflexivity present opportunities to challenge dominant narratives and disrupt hegemony in social work practice, education, and research. In this paper, we seek to explore these reflexive research paradigms as tools of critical race pedagogy in social work education by presenting four critical autoethnographic narratives of graduate and doctoral social work students. In each narrative, we grapple with power and privilege embedded in our positionalities and explore critically our motivation to pursue social work graduate training. Additionally, we examine our experiences in the graduate programs and conclude by discussing the role of unsettling reflexivity to advance social work’s commitment to social justice. This paper highlights the importance of incorporating reflexive anti-racist pedagogical tools to prepare social work students and scholars to contest power, privilege, and positionality.

Social work education and social justice

The training of prospective anti-racist social work professionals does not take place in a vacuum. Despite its commitment to social and racial justice (NASW, 2017), social work is called to wrestle with neoliberal socio-political and economic forces that are not only widening the racial wealth gap and increasing health disparities, but also distancing the profession from its core mission and values (Harris, 2014; Reisch, 2013). Scholars suggest social work practice and training have experienced a process of de-politicization where increasing emphasis has been placed on individuals’ resilience rather than structural transformation and resistance to neoliberal policies (Harris, 2014; Reisch & Jani, 2012). Similarly, social work practice and training have heavily focused on maintaining consensus and equilibrium rather than grappling with conflict and achieving structural changes, even in social work’s macro practice (Jani & Reisch, 2011; Singh & Cowden, 2015). In order to pursuit social and racial justice, social work education needs to engage students to think critically, sustain an iterative praxis of reflexive conversations about the implications of individuals’ identities of power and oppression, and challenge students to go beyond competencies and work collaboratively to change unjust social conditions (Reisch, 2013). Integrating a critical theory-informed curriculum and critically reflexive pedagogical processes have contributed to the development of transformative learning where social work students not only gain valuable knowledge but also are called to take collective action (Morley, 2016; Singh, 2019).

Critical race pedagogy and unsettling reflexivity

Critical pedagogy has been described as a teaching approach that engages students actively in drawing from their personal lived experiences and knowledge to reflect, analyze, and create knowledge while interrogating and challenging dominant narratives, attitudes, and beliefs (Freire, 1970). However, scholars have debated the extent to which critical pedagogy incorporates issues of racism (Gordon, 1995). Drawing from Critical Race Theory (CRT) tenets, scholars have established Critical Race Pedagogy as a liberatory anti-racist pedagogy that explicitly outlines four key elements: 1) the endemic nature of racism, 2) the recognition of power structures in the American social fabric, 3) the importance of counternarratives, and 4) advocacy and education as key to the pursuit of social justice (Lynn et al., 2013). Research suggests the integration of critical race pedagogy curriculum in social work education has the potential to deconstruct and decenter dominant narratives that sustain racial oppression and White supremacy (Lynn, 2004; Nakaoka & Ortiz, 2018).

Similarly, critical reflexivity presents a disconnect from integrating an anti-oppressive analysis. Established as an exercise of considering individual’s beliefs and personal experiences (Dewey, 1997), critical reflexivity was further developed to interrogate decision-making and knowledge production processes, particularly in relation to power, privilege, and structural inequities (D’cruz et al., 2007). However, reflexivity has been used as a research methodological tool to reinforce colonial, neoliberal, and colorblind approaches to knowledge production through claims of validity and legitimization from a social location of privilege that has failed to problematize and visibilize power differentials more explicitly and critically (Badwall, 2016; Hooks, 1990; Varadharajan, 1995). For instance, scholars have criticized self-reflexivity in the academy and activist circles as individual’s attempts of undoing privilege by confessing privileges that replicate logics of colonial settlement where indigenous communities and brown bodies are supposed to disappear for settlers to become inheritors of indigenous’ land, spirituality, resources, and ancestral wisdom rather than adopting commitments to critically interrogate and create collective structures to dismantle systems that maintain privileges for dominant groups at the expense of the oppression of groups in the margins (Di Leonardo, 1998; Morgensen, 2011; Perez, 2005).

As a result, scholars have called for further exposure of power relations (Visweswaran, 1994) and suggested the term uncomfortable reflexivity. This term, rather than positioning reflexivity as a self-indulgent telling of honesty or humility that replicates white colonial emancipatory constructions, reflexivities of discomfort engages in ‘practices of confounding disruptions’ and pushes toward unfamiliar and uncomfortable arenas of continued struggle by visibilizing and challenging white colonial liberal discourses (Calderon, 2016; Pillow, 2003). Instead of recognizing the humanity of the oppressed groups in the existing social order or using individuals in the margins to justify extractive and hierarchical relationships of power and privilege, scholars have proposed alternative approaches to disrupt the existing social order drawing from queer and indigenous futurities and movements to shift away from individual confessions and center a liberatory praxis of critical reflection and critical action that dismantles systems and ideologies focusing on replicating settler colonialism and White supremacy (Chawla & Atay, 2018; Dutta, 2018; Smith, 2013; Winddance Twine & Gardener, 2013). Moreover, uncomfortable reflexivity is intrinsically in alignment with Critical Race pedagogy, it recognizes White power as a structure of racial dominance exerted through the subordination of indigenous, Black, brown, African Americans, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islanders, and in the possessive investment in Whiteness (Dyer, 2011; Lipsitz, 2018). Instead of reinforcing dominant narratives of identity politics whereby individual racial groups fight for self-preservation maintaining possessive investment in whiteness, reflexivities of discomfort challenges this pervasive strategy to diminish legitimacy and credibility of groups in the margins by leveraging scholars and community organizers’ cultural production and advocacy movement efforts to understand the heterogeneity of groups and advance social justice struggles collectively (Daphne, 2008; Lipsitz, 2018; Smith, 2013).

Critical autoethnography: positionality and power

Autoethnography is a qualitative paradigm where researchers systematically describe and analyze personal experiences (auto) embedded within cultural and sociopolitical contexts (ethno) through writing (graphy) (Adams, 2015; Ellis et al., 2011). Critical autoethnography expands this research approach by focusing explicitly on power, visibilizing social structures of domination, and counteracting traditional research approaches of ‘othering’ and ‘distancing’ (Boylorn & Orbe, 2016; Gupta, 2017 ; Holman Jones, 2018). Unsettling reflexivity and Critical Race pedagogy goes hand in hand with critical autoethnography to wrestle with structures of power, racism, and oppression embedded in social structures. Both of these paradigms of inquiry can be implemented to enhance social work practitioners’ reflexivity in clinical settings, amplify social work students’ voices and engage in critical dialogue across positionality, and make research participatory and accessible to broader audiences (Gant et al., 2019; Jensen-Hart & Williams, 2010; Witkin, 2014). Social work scholars have used collaborative autoethnography methodology to examine hegemony in social work doctoral education and explore possibilities for radical changes in the training of social work scholars (Oswald et al., 2020) in addition to raising issues of preparedness for field placements, and ethics (Gant et al., 2019; Lapadat, 2017).

Authors’ positionalities

In our efforts to integrate participatory approaches to our critical autoethnographic inquiry, we made a decision to write a positionality statement describing our writing as a collective of students with multiple subjectivities at the intersection of privilege, power, and oppression. Scholars are increasingly adopting practices to contest colonial research paradigms and methodologies that privilege and codify hierarchies of ‘substantial contributions’ based on specific types of ‘legitimized expertise’, ‘objectivity’, and ‘rigor’ (Montero-Sieburth, 2020; Sarna-Wojcicki et al., 2017). Additionally, growing critical discourses have highlighted hierarchical power embedded in authorship and publication productivity that are becoming firmly entrenched with neoliberalism, reinforcing the establishment of market and competition-based systems in universities, and contradicting ethical principles of recognizing equitably intellectual contributions (Macfarlane, 2017, 2019). In light of that, we write as a collective that values all contributions equitably and we embodied this praxis integrating participatory frameworks (Wallerstein et al., 2017). We committed to sharing decision-making power and participating in iterative discussions to reach full consensus throughout our virtual meetings where we engaged in planning, data analysis, writing, and manuscript revising. We write to uplift our praxis of unsettling power hierarchies and while authorship order and narratives are structured in a particular order to balance the emphasis on the experiences of students in the Master’s Social Work program while highlighting the writing contributions, we write from a multi-vocal perspective committed to illuminating and contesting areas of continuous struggle, ‘dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen’ through an embodiment of critical race pedagogy and unsettling reflexivity (Milner, 2007).

Methods

We applied an auto-ethnography approach to explore our experiences of pedagogy and social justice culture of social work education. Auto-ethnography consists in the anthropological study of an individual’s culture through exercises of self-reflection and analysis of autobiographical documents (Hayano, 2008). A critical self-awareness and introspection from the primary source of study at hand is what distinguishes autoethnography from ethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). This approach focuses on investigating research questions through the creation of narratives shaped by the writer’s personal experiences within a culture influenced by social contexts and institutions (Patton, 2014). Social work scholars have used autoethnography to explore ideologies influencing students’ research training and lived experiences of placement (Gant et al., 2019; Oswald et al., 2020).

We employed critical autoethnography to interrogate our experiences of dissonance with social work education at a private university in the northeast of the U.S. We deliberated and co-developed three central research questions guiding our inquiry throughout the autoethnography sessions:

• 1.How do our personal trajectories and intersectional identities shape our personal motivations to pursue social work education and how do they interact with structures relevant to social work pedagogy?

• 2.How do dominant narratives and discourses privilege and/or diminish students’ experiences in social work education?

• 3.What possibilities can emerge by integrating a praxis of intersectionality, critical race pedagogy, and unsettling reflexivity in social work education?

Although we had different roles as instructor and student in the graduate social work course where we met, we shared a profound commitment to expand and continue our learning communities beyond the classroom. Nonprobability sampling techniques such as purposive sampling was used to recruit participants (Etikan & Bala, 2017). Given the study’s main focus of exploring students’ dissonant experiences with social work education, only individuals who identified as social work students enrolled at the same institution with the interest and capacity to commit to all autoethnographic sessions were considered. Upon the completion of the course and approval of the Institutional Review Board (IRB), the doctoral candidate sent an email invitation to former students (n = 15) enrolled in a foundational graduate macro social work course to participate in the monthly writing sessions for an academic semester. Interested students in participating in the sessions contacted directly the doctoral candidate via email. An information session was held virtually with interested students (n = 3) where proposed questions, writing sessions format, and time commitment was described. Consent from interested graduate social work students (n = 3) was obtained, questions regarding the study were clarified, and students’ input and feedback on the writing sessions were also continuously requested.

In order to reflect upon our experiences, we participated in five virtual auto-ethnographic writing sessions that took place via zoom across the summer and fall semester of 2020 (June 2020-Dec 2020) where we explored our cultural biases and personal experiences. Each session’s duration was about 60–90 minutes. The format of the sessions consisted in a grounding activity followed by self-reflexive writing exercises that encouraged us to interrogate our personal journeys, motivations to pursue social work education, our experiences in the writing exercises, and our visions for a social work praxis of critical race pedagogy and uncomfortable reflexivity (Table 1). In each session, we engaged in peer-debriefing where we shared our writings with each other and provided feedback to collectively identify, critique, and discuss emerging codes and developing themes from the analysis and discussion. First, we individually read all narratives to familiarize ourselves with not only the main stories, but also with introspective elements embodying the full range of experiences interacting with social work education including emotions, thoughts, relationships, and wounds (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). Next, we engaged in an iterative process of virtual meeting discussions that interrogated our experiences interacting with structural and cultural elements of social work education through an intersectionality, critical race pedagogy, participatory and unsettling reflexivity frameworks. From our collaborative discussions, we identified emerging codes which we applied throughout our narratives. Together, we developed a codebook, coded all narratives in NVivo individually, and met iteratively to discuss discrepancies and reach 100% agreement.

Table 1. Auto-ethnography sessions overview.

Session	Goals	Topics & Activities	Writing Prompts
1	Build rapport with one another and clarify any questions regarding the auto-ethnographic sessions	- Overview of Autoethnographic sessions and clarification of any questions - Obtain Verbal Informed Consent to participate and audio record sessions - Introductions & group agreements - Group writing. Share writings with one another and provide feedback - Closing	- What are some important identities that make you who you are? (prompt: how do you identify yourself in terms of race, class, gender, religion, ability status, etc.) - What has motivated you to pursue social work education? - In one word, how would you describe how you feel after today’s session? what is something that you liked and that you would like to change/try differently?
2	Reflect and interrogate our understanding and experiences relevant to critical race pedagogy and unsettling reflexivity	- Obtain Verbal Informed Consent to participate and audio record sessions - Icebreaker/team building exercise - Reviewing group agreements - Group writing. Share writings with one another and provide feedback - Closing	- When you hear about the words critical race pedagogy and unsettling reflexivity, what words come to your mind? - What do teaching, learning, and reflecting mean to you? please share about the significance if any, it has played in your life and in your social work education and training - What is the role of questioning and challenging dominant beliefs, ways of learning/teaching in your life and in social work education? how is that reflected in your experience? - In one word, how would you describe how you feel after today’s session? what is something that you liked and that you would like to change?
3	Reflect and interrogate our experiences in social work education and generate recommendations	- Obtain Verbal Informed Consent to participate and audio record sessions - Icebreaker/team building exercise - Reviewing group agreements - Group writing. Share writings with one another and provide feedback - Closing	- How have your personal and professional experiences shaped your learning? - In your experiences, what have been some strengths and challenges of social work education in integrating critical pedagogy and reflexivity? - Drawing from your experiences, what are some recommendations you’d like to share to strengthen social work education in relation to critical race pedagogy and unsettling reflexivity? - In one word, how would you describe how you feel after today’s session? what is something that you liked and that you would like to change?
4	Revise individual narratives and analyze emerging themes	- Obtain Verbal Informed Consent to participate and audio record sessions - Icebreaker/team building exercise - Reviewing group agreements - Group writing and analysis. - Closing	- What are some emerging themes you notice from our individual and collective narratives? - In one word, how would you describe how you feel after today’s session? what is something that you liked and that you would like to change?
5	Finalize writing and analysis. Final closing reflections	- Obtain Verbal Informed Consent to participate and audio record sessions - Icebreaker/team building exercise - Reviewing group agreements - Group writing and analysis. - Closing	- How are the emerging themes we have individually and collectively identified converging or diverging? - What was your experience overall in the autoethnographic sessions? what would you like to change?

Upon the completion of the coding, we reviewed the codes as a team and our discussions gave rise to four major components as a result of our inquiry. Each narrative describes in depth four major components: 1) individual positionality, 2) motivation to pursue social work, 3) experiences of social work education, and 4) perceptions and implications of critical race pedagogy and unsettling reflexivity as social work pedagogical tools.

Narratives

Being self-aware and educating each other to shake the system to enact change—Rabiatu

I think of my identity as a woman; mainly as an African—Caribbean woman born in Boston, raised in Ghana and nurtured by my Trinis. I’ve realized that to be African—Caribbean woman, is to be: a sister, a mother, friend, sympathizer, nurturer. I’m supposed to be a woman before a child. Maintain my modesty yet bare children. Have a husband but not a boyfriend. Be forgiving of others yet no room for me to make mistakes. Even with all this, I still love being an African Caribbean woman because the strength I possess is the strength passed on from generations of strong black women who fight for their own. To guide and protect what others have set out to destroy, the true soul and heart of a Black woman. These main identities have shaped who I am and how I interact with others who may be different from me.

As a first generation college student of color, I often see the disparity between myself and that of my fellow white classmates. In order for me to do well, I have to work harder than my fellow counterparts. This is the reality that I live daily and has motivated me to pursue a social work education.

A few months after I was born, my father retired from working in food services at the hospital to take care of me and my brother in Ghana, West Africa. He wanted us to understand the importance of working hard for what you want, especially when not having the luxury of generational wealth. He insisted on redirecting that energy by reflecting how life unfolds and how we can actively steer our lives in the direction we want to go. Rather than looking at other people’s paths, one should create and modify one’s own path to achieve personal growth and happiness. This is my father’s advice that I have held on to and lived by each day as I strive to navigate the world. In Ghana, although I lived a comfortable life with my family, I noticed that not all the people around me had such comfort. I saw my neighbors’ children selling sachets of water in the streets after school as a source of income to provide for their families and to be able to go to school. When they were sick, they rarely had access to well-equipped health facilities nor could they even afford to go to these un-equipped hospitals.

Seven years later, I moved to the U.S. with my family to further my education. I realize that while I may have lived a really comfortable life in Africa, in America, I am considered low-income since my mom is the only working member of my immediate family. This life experience has motivated me to continue to work hard and be an instrument of change for people who look like me.

During my time in the social work program, I have noticed the use of critical race pedagogy as a way to understand one’s individual experience in relation to social contexts. Often times, there is this rude awakening of, no matter how hard I work, there are systems set in place to keep me in the same position. The American dream is a façade, an illusion cloaked by capitalism. Until we all see and truly understand how our positionality either benefits or oppresses us, the world will continue to promote oppressive dominant cultures that continue to divide the country into the haves and have nots.

Whitney M Young states, ‘Every man is our brother, and every man’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal.’ By seeing each other as equals and recognizing that our lives are tied to one another, the compassion and educating may lead to a healthier society in which we may all succeed. By othering each other due to differences, we do our society an injustice that continues to divide and empower the one percent who strives off the imbalance of power. This understanding has made me aware of the importance of being self-aware and educating each other as a way to shake the system to change and enact change.

As much as social work promotes this idea of understanding intersectionality and how access and positionality allows for certain privileges, it fails to be purposeful in dismantling oppressive structures such as affordability of education and the notion of unpaid work as a formal requirement for students to make an impact at the expense of one’s mental and emotional well-being. There’s this misconstrued concept that you have to suffer to effect change.

I’m grateful to have this writing experience as a way to truly reflect on my life and my experiences with a group of people where we shared knowledge and gained different insights. It has helped me to have support especially in a time of uncertainty and a space to not only validate one’s experiences but also to create a community to uplift each other’s voices.

Embarking on a journey of struggle, complexity, vulnerability, and healing—Rachel

I am the daughter of Suzanne Vine, who is the daughter of Myra Vine. I owe the person I am today to the women who came before me, who taught me that womanhood is a never-ending process of learning, loving, teaching, and fighting for what you believe in. I grew up with a vague understanding that Jewish intergenerational trauma traced its way through my family lineage, but little clarity of how and what that meant. Today, I recognize how that trauma hinders some Jews from fighting for the liberation of others, and I am conscious of how I understand my Jewish identity. I hope to use it as a tool for commitment to justice, rather than inaction. As I think about my own twisting and turning identities, I remember how the classroom is a complicated space, because we are not always aware of all the different selves and histories that we bring to each conversation.

The journey to graduate school was not easy for me. A few months after graduating from college, I developed severe, debilitating pain and was eventually diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I now identify as disabled. I never experienced college with a disability, so when I enrolled in graduate school, I was scared. Then, the summer before I began graduate school at Boston University, I nearly lost my father to sudden unexplained cardiac arrest. I spent most of the summer sitting anxiously in a hospital room, unsure if my next visit to his room would be the last one. Luckily, against all odds, he survived. When the semester began, I thought of BU as a place where I attended classes. I rushed home to be on my own afterward. Although I had endless problems with my undergraduate institution, I missed the familiarity of friends, clubs, community organizations, and professors whose office hours I felt comfortable crying in. The lack of community, in part because of my own resistance to engage, definitely made the experience a challenge. Simultaneously, my frustrations with the healthcare industrial complex motivated me to gain the skills to support individuals with chronic illnesses like me, and to ensure that family members of those experiencing health issues have access to the support they need.

I love to learn. I want to learn as much as I can about disability justice, healing. and liberation, and while I expected my masters to be rife with issues, as any flawed institution is, I remained curious and hopeful. In some ways, I was met with experiences that exceeded my expectations. In my foundation internship, I worked with a fifth grade student with a physical disability. I disclosed my own diagnosis, and told her that one way I cope is by writing a fictional story about a character with arthritis. Her face lit up. She told me that she wanted to try writing one herself. At our next session, she handed me her story about ‘Anna Sthesia’ a character with brittle bone disease, aptly named after the aspect of her upcoming surgery that made her most nervous. She told me that ‘Sometimes my brain just talks to me and says “You’re not good enough!” but you know what? I am good enough!’ In moments like this, I felt as if I chose the right profession, one in which my clients could learn from each other, and build and grow together.

On the other hand, I felt as though some of my experiences in the program were lacking. A few specific courses centered radical healing in an exciting and liberatory way, but many of them felt stifled and outdated. In one of my favorite courses, I learned how to apply a liberation health framework to clinical practice, which was exciting, since I had thus far been most enthusiastic about my macro courses, despite my desire to pursue clinical social work. However, I noticed that only about one reading in the syllabus centered disability. Although it was an assigned reading, when my professor asked us to raise our hands honestly if we completed the reading, mine was the only one that went up. I suddenly felt very alone. I was uneasy about bringing up this issue, particularly as a disabled white woman, when the syllabi and courses already have significant room to improve in other realms, especially with regards to race. On the other hand, a disability justice framework centers the perspectives of queer Disabled Black people and people of color, and I longed for space to include it in the classroom. Especially given that almost every student will work with a client with a disability at some point, I wondered why this shortcoming was never addressed. I am still grappling with this tension.

Listening to each of my classmates read their personal writing from this project made me feel more connected to this community than ever. I am not sure that liberatory education is possible without vulnerability, but I also recognize how many of us are hesitant to display more of ourselves to each other in the classroom, just like I was. In any relationship, there is fear of getting hurt and of causing harm, but if we do not build those relationships within these messy institutions, I’m not sure that we will ever be able to build the spaces for healing that we are all hopefully here to fight for.

Cultivating a praxis of spiritual liberation, dissent, discomfort, and reflexivity—Adam

Figuring out who I really am is my life’s work and my draw to social work. I grew up in a white, working middle class suburb of Milwaukee and we’d probably been Catholic forever. From what my grandparents have told me, my ancestors were peasant farmers from Germany, France, Poland, Norway, and Italy who immigrated to Wisconsin to work the land or become machinists in the city. The men before me wore a stiff upper lip and worked with their hands, while I was imaginative, cerebral, and expressive. Feeling ‘different’ soon became familiar territory. My father worked as a firefighter and my mother a special education paraprofessional; both taught me the value of service, though our white suburban worldview demanded this to be conditional. My paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were Milwaukee police, and a ‘law and order’ ideology of coded racism permeated. I asked a lot of questions but learned to remain silent when that seemed the most comfortable thing to do.

In retrospect, the summer of 2008 was life-defining for me. In those months, my mother died suddenly from a brain aneurism, shortly after which I came out as gay in light of my newly existential outlook. In my hours of vulnerability, I began to question my learned moral rigidity. There were my supportive friends and teachers, the transplant nurse who counseled us in my mother’s organ donation, and my Lesbian Fairy Godmother aunts who’d paved the way of queerness in my family. There were therapists and mental health workers I’d meet a few years later after I began living with bipolar disorder—some were more helpful than others. There were spiritual teachers through books and retreats as I began practicing Buddhism. Each lesson carried political underpinnings, and over time, I could no longer look away from the fact that my own healing was mutually intertwined with the healing of everyone else.

Critical race pedagogy and unsettling reflexivity free the self from the island of individualism and place it within the interconnected web of humanity. I found this orientation to align well with my belief as a Buddhist practitioner that my own spiritual liberation and that of all beings are one in the same. Still, I experienced the full potential of critical pedagogy in only a few of my classes. These were classes that prioritized a student-centered learning community, encouraged dissent, and elicited our social work skills during the class itself. Moreover, the instructors were intentional about issues of oppression and inclusion compared to other classes where they could be conveniently ignored. On one level, I’ve been humbled by what I don’t know and have learned the importance of maintaining this stance. On another level, I’ve begun to learn some reflexive tools to act with greater intention amid these forces.

One example has been investigating my family’s role in policing. Practicing reflexive social work means looking deeply at the dominant ideologies of my family system, including ‘law and order’ ideology and the harm it has caused. Where I used to distance myself from this ideology out of wanting nothing to do with it, I’ve learned that growth requires me to examine how this ideology has affected my family and me. Accountability matters. Reflexive practice requires me to enter the belly of the beast, so to speak, if I have any hope of subverting the racist and violent ideologies within my family. It requires curiosity, difficult conversations, open conflict, and discovering the limits of my other values, such as harmony and deference to my elders.

In my foundation year, I gained much more reflexive practice in my internship, participation in student union activities, and engagement in political struggle than the social work curriculum itself. In most of my classes, the curriculum centered the healing practices of white intellectuals while falling short of examining white supremacy culture. Clinical coursework often favored technique over process. My internship supervisor at an urban after-school program, in contrast, invited regular self-reflection, of which technique was a byproduct.

The auto-ethnography exercise has been instrumental in clarifying my intentions as a social worker. Admittedly, it has left me feeling overwhelmed at times by the complexity of my own identity. I believe this is a healthy and necessary discovery. How can I be present with a client’s equally complex identity if I haven’t continued to grapple with my own? How can I hold space for a client’s sociopolitical struggle if I haven’t examined my own role in that struggle? Such exercises should be integrated into the mainstream of social work education.

Leading with brave spaces to wrestle with discomfort—Catalina

My story starts with the journey of my ancestors in the villages of southern China. Complicated by patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, my ancestors played multiple roles: fierce matriarchs raising families, men working in the fields, and migrants crossing borders and oceans while sending remittances home. Through a journey of continuous survival and struggle, my ancestors fought for the dreams of future generations and built diasporic communities in occupied Turtle island, and the territories of Emberá, Muiscas, and Wayuu peoples.

I migrated to Massachusetts from Colombia at the age of sixteen years old. Youth programs provided me the platform to understand my ancestors’ and my lived experiences as valuable forms of knowledge within a much broader context shaped by power, privilege, and oppression. I learned about the struggle of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), particularly regarding collective mobilizations to fight against gentrification, police brutality, and racism in the Greater Boston Area. Learning was no longer just a form of survival, a form of privilege that my ancestors were denied to partake in, I started envisioning learning as a praxis of radically imagining ways to grapple and wrestle with life struggles in community.

As a second generation Chinese Colombian American, settler and migrant, I struggled finding a sense of belonging in a world shaped by systems rooted in racism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Regardless, I felt a sense of belonging and felt at home while working in coalition with youth and families of color in their fight for justice and humanity through community building, organizing, digital storytelling, and participatory action research.

Women of color mentors have guided me throughout my life including my journey of pursuing a doctoral degree in social work. I wrestled with mixed feelings of self-doubt and fear where I was concerned of losing my soul and becoming white at the hands of the ivory tower to fulfill their neoliberal, colonial, elitist, and capitalist agenda. However, it was precisely women of color mentors that invited me to disrupt these ways of being by nurturing radical visions where I could bring communities with me in this journey to effect transformative changes.

Embodying and engaging in a continuous praxis of unsettling reflexivity and sentipensante pedagogy has been essential. I’m interested in not only looking inward and outward through my lived experiences, but also challenge and transform ways of being and thinking within my relationships with myself, my peers, colleagues, and students throughout my research, teaching, and community collaborations. This autoethnographic exercise was part of this praxis that was possible with my colleagues beyond classrooms.

In my doctoral program, I’ve noticed the emphasis given to research and the little attention that’s given to connecting our research, education, and training with existing organizing movements of social, racial, and economic justice. Some of my most meaningful learning experiences as a doctoral social work student and instructor have been shaped by co-creating communities within and beyond the classrooms willing to be vulnerable and lean towards discomfort and growth. How can we redefine our purpose and be willing to challenge forms of oppression and power? How much longer can we stand being bystanders and perpetrators of violence? Humanizing the classrooms and integrating defiant pedagogies is one first important step to address these challenges at the root. Instructors and faculty should continue learning and interrogating themselves regarding the power and privilege they decide to uphold or disrupt with purpose and accountability. Collectively, we should question and own the ways we create harm and be prepared to change the conditions so everyone can be accountable. We need to be bold and lead with brave spaces welcoming discomfort.

Discussion

Our goal was to amplify counter-narratives and engage in critical reflexive exploration and interrogation of dominant discourse embedded in cultural and structural elements of social work education. Instead of homogenizing our individual subjective experiences across intersecting agent identities of privilege and target identities of oppression, we sought to question our experiences and differences and how they contributed to upholding the existing social order in social work education. While each narrative was written independently, overlapping themes emerged across our narratives regarding our experiences of the culture of social work education, particularly in regards to a praxis of unsettling reflexivity as a critical pedagogy tool. Themes reflected our positionalities, motivation to pursue social work education, and the ways engaging in critical autoethnography facilitated processes of building a sense of community and purpose. Although these themes cannot be generalized, key themes across our narratives were consistent with research discussing social work education’s areas of growth, particularly on interrogating students’ positionalities and integrating an intersectional and anti-racist lens to the culture of social work training. We present emerging themes across our narratives in the form of implications and recommendations to strengthen social work’s training programs.

Creating spaces to explore and interrogate ‘Who am I and why I’m doing what I’m doing’

Our narratives illustrate the development of our individual selves does not take place in a vacuum. Instead, our narratives reflect the ways our major life events and experiences were shaped by structural forces. Each of our narratives was filled with a plethora of valuable experiences that influenced our identity and informed our motivation to pursue social work education. While we identified social work education components that explicitly focused on anti-oppression, we also wrestled with implicit curriculum components that failed to examine critically positionality, intersectionality, and white supremacy. Some examples included the lack of disability-specific course content, poor integration of CRT framework, and limited opportunities for students to critically reflect on their positionality and interrogate internalized embodiment of white supremacy. This was also examined in the context of social work practice and training where exposing unexamined power differentials highlighted potential implications in clinical practice between social work practitioners and clients as well as in training, between course instructors and students. This is consistent with existing research that highlights the need for social work instructors and faculty to be more effective in developing course content and assignments that explicitly engages students to interrogate underlying assumptions of power, privilege, and oppression in order to create structural changes (Atteberry-Ash et al., 2021; Fultz & Kondrat, 2019; Kim & Sellmaier, 2020; Mehrotra et al., 2019).

Autoethnography and critical race reflexivity present opportunities for students to gain an increased critical understanding of positionality in relation to power and ‘why I’m doing what I’m doing’. While initial goals of the social work profession in the 1800s focused primarily on ‘helping’ the poor and this approach later expanded beyond social work to additional ‘helping’ professions including teaching and service-based positions, failing to interrogate and contest this pervasive dominant discourse contributes to the reproduction of structural harm and white savior complex that undermines communities’ agency and self-determination (Finn, 2020). Alternatively, scholars have proposed social work practitioners, scholars, and educators to adopt intersectional indigenous feminist discourses that confronts anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and neoliberalism by practicing radical relationality where accountability between individuals is grounded and interdependent on building structural accountability through social and political change (Haley, 2020; Snelgrove et al., 2014; Yazzie & Baldy, 2018). Although discussing and acknowledging the embodiment and reproduction of white supremacy at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional level remains challenging for students and faculty, we must keep pressing forward to challenge the ways social work education continues to remain complicit in enacting oppression (Edmonds-Cady & Wingfield, 2017). This presents important implications for social work education to re-examine the ways social work programs are integrating spaces to understand both, the communities we serve and our individual identities embedded within power structures.

Disrupting damage-centered approaches to pedagogy inside and outside of the classroom

One of the emerging themes that we identified across our narratives was the tension between the learning gained inside and outside of the classroom setting. While we brought valuable experiential knowledge from our lived experiences and were further advanced with social work field education internships outside of the classrooms, we wrestled with Whitestream course content that emphasized ‘damage-centered’ research that seeks to center people’s pain and brokenness (Tuck, 2009). By applying unsettling critical race reflexivity to our writing, we attempted to move away from damage-centered research and pedagogy to understand the history of ourselves in relationship to place and context. We challenged the normalization of embracing attitudes that settled with oppressive structures in social work education and shortsightedness on topics such as disability and white supremacy. This was consistent with research that suggests cultivating an antiracist and anti-oppressive praxis requires the integration of project-based learning, critical reflection, peer conversations grappling with positionality and white supremacy, and resistance strategies inside and outside of the classroom (Hamilton-Mason & Schneider, 2018; Lay & McGuire, 2010; McGuire & Lay, 2020; Nicotera, 2019). In order to cultivate a praxis of critical reflection and critical action (Freire, 1970) that transcends the borders of the classroom setting, it is essential to intentionally co-create brave spaces where students can have the courage, support, and accountability to be in dialogue and be challenged, particularly in regards to understanding power, privilege, and oppression (Arao & Clemens, 2013; Greenfield et al., 2018; Karki, 2016). Across our narratives, these elements were embodied and visible in the ways we engaged in controversy with civility instead of agreeing to disagree, owning our intentions and impact rather than not taking things personally, advocating for clarifying conversations, and interrogating our individual personal assumptions on respect and what keeps from challenging ourselves to disrupt group norms that refrain students from engaging honestly and critically in controversial issues (Arao & Clemens, 2013).

Fighting a culture of burnout by building a culture of relationality and community

Our narratives illustrate the complicated personal histories and experiences that we bring to social work programs. Originated from institutional oppression, traumatic life experiences such as witnessing loved ones suffer from chronic health conditions, mourning the loss of loved ones, and migrating to different communities can present significant challenges for students’ wellbeing and mental health (Blanco et al., 2016; Chavez-Dueñas et al., 2019). Some of these traumatic events may persist and influence the ways we can fully be present in our relationships and work, particularly in social work practice. Research suggests that social work clinical training involving trauma content can be rewarding and at the same time stressful and retraumatizing for students (Butler et al., 2017). Moreover, students may also struggle with serious mental health issues, learning disabilities, and financial stress that often remain invisible to the eyes of the social work school community (Covarrubias & Han, 2011). Social work students overwhelmingly report managing numerous competing priorities with large workloads and increasing accrual of debt and vicarious trauma which can have negative outcomes on students’ health and risk of burnout (Benner & Curl, 2018; Wilson, 2016)

It is important to disrupt the normalized culture of production and effect structural changes to increase supports for social work students. One way to trouble this dominant approach embedded in interpersonal and institutional dynamics is to incorporate trauma-informed social work core principles of safety, trust, collaboration, choice, and empowerment across social work pedagogy and practice (Levenson, 2017). Critical autoethnography and reflexivity present potential opportunities to apply some of these principles. Research suggests integrating critical reflexive writing assignments and peer debriefing in social work pedagogy can mitigate burnout and vicarious trauma and promote students’ development of self-care and community care skills (Lewis & King, 2019). Autoethnography presents opportunities to create spaces for students and faculty to co-construct knowledge by weaving in critiques of power structures that intersect at the personal, political, historical, and cultural levels (Bell et al., 2020; Cervantes-Soon, 2014, p.; Silva, 2017). Furthermore, considering students’ expertise and integrating their input in the development of social work curricula can enhance student participation and build a culture of collaboration between students and faculty (Fuentes et al., 2021; Henderson et al., 2020; Jones, 2018). Revising social work curriculum and engagement activities in partnership with students considering these multilayered challenges, can promote a counter culture that disrupts the reproduction of neoliberal transactional relationships of commodity and hierarchy. Students can feel isolated in these experiences and building communities of support and learning throughout social work education is essential.

Limitations

There are a number of limitations to this study. First, the limitations of sampling of graduate social work students enrolled in one course at one university. Our narratives and experiences are specific to a mid-size private university in the northeast of the U.S. which likely differs from students with different identities in different social and political contexts. Further studies should explore the perceptions of social work students enrolled in different courses at different universities and at multiple trajectories of their program. Gathering data at different time points and including students with different backgrounds can elicit information regarding their experiences in social work education and the extent to which critical race pedagogy and unsettling reflexivities are integrated and beneficial to social work education.

Conclusion

Universities have historically been established as structures of knowledge capable of reproducing dominant narratives and counternarratives. In order to wrestle and disrupt the mechanisms that diminish the credibility and legitimacy of counternarratives and ways of knowing, being, and thinking that are part of ecologies of knowledge, it is necessary to acknowledge past and present oppressive structures and promote a collective approach to integrate new perspectives (Grosfoguel, 2013; De Sousa Santos, 2015). Our narratives illustrate the ways critical autoethnography, unsettling reflexivity, and critical race pedagogy can be potential pedagogical tools to interrogate our positionalities, motivation to pursue social work, and further examine more critically dominant discourses, structures, and culture of social work education. By engaging in a series of critical race reflexive writing and peer debriefing exercises, our narratives converged across common themes that underscore the importance of interrogating social work students’ positionality as active subjects and agents that contest with power, privilege, and oppression in clinical and macro practice. Findings of a content analysis of recent social work literature reveals that social work research is failing to address institutional racism when working with non-white communities (Corley & Young, 2018). Additionally, research has underscored the importance of integrating anti-racism and anti-oppression pedagogy through various tools such as storytelling (Alderman et al., 2019; Constance-Huggins et al., 2020). Program administrators and faculty in the U.S. have grappled with measuring successfully social work students’ fulfillment of the profession’s competencies and outcomes described by the Council on Social Work Education and Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (CSWE, 2015; Tajima et al., 2020). Our findings highlight critical autoethnography, unsettling reflexivity, and critical race pedagogy as potential tools aligned with social work profession’s competencies to incorporate inside and outside of the classroom to advance the pursuit of training prospective leaders to achieve social justice through an anti-racist and anti-oppression lens.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of any affiliated educational institution.

Notes on contributors

Catalina Tang Yan

Catalina Tang Yan, is a doctoral student at Boston University School of Social Work and her research interests are in community and youth participatory action research, systems of power and oppression, and social justice.

Rabiatu Orlandimeje

Rabiatu Orlandimeje, is a graduate student at Boston University School of Social Work.

Rachel Drucker

Rachel Drucker, is a graduate student at Boston University School of Social Work.

Adam J. Lang

Adam J. Lang, is a graduate student at Boston University School of Social Work.