Teaching Note—The Ethnographic Interview as a Method in Multicultural Social Work Education

ABSTRACT

The ever growing diversity poses challenges for social work educators, who are engaged in developing new pedagogical methods for enhancing multicultural practice. Within the framework of a diversity course, I have developed a pedagogical practice for training social workers to work in a diverse, multicultural reality. Students conduct an ethnographic interview with a person from a different, unfamiliar group, creating an encounter with the other. They then analyze the interview and complete a written reflective assignment. The interview and accompanying assignment allow students to reflect critically on how their image of the other is socially constructed and on the essential role of context and power relations in the construction of the other, the self, and the relationship between them.

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Notes on contributors

Yochay Nadan

Yochay Nadan is a senior lecturer at The Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.