The how of social justice education in social work: Decentering colonial whiteness and building relational reflexivity through circle pedagogy and Image Theatre

ABSTRACT

Teaching courses on social justice are mainstays of social work education and are considered imperative for ethically responsible social work practice. Social justice education comes with many challenges, including white settler student resistance and difficulties translating social justice content into social work practice. We suggest a move from viewing social justice practice as a value or skill set - as part of the ‘professional self’ – to one that understands social justice as relational and as a politics of being and acting. In this article, we discuss methods for decentering colonial whiteness in the social work classroom by adopting relational reflexive pedagogies more congruent with social justice content. The first half of the article focuses on the white and colonial epistemological foundations of social justice education in social work and notions of the social worker subjectivity as ‘good’ and ‘moral’. In the second half of the article, we invite social work educators to reflect on congruency between social justice theories discussed in the classroom and the practice of how we teach these concepts. We then offer circle pedagogy and Image Theatre exercises as examples of practicing a relational ethic and politic of social justice in the process of teaching.

KEYWORDS:

• Social justice education
• decolonizing
• whiteness
• reflexivity
• circle pedagogy
• Theatre of the oppressed
• social work education

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Settler colonialism is defined as genocidal colonial practices that do not merely extract resources or labor but aim to remove and erase Indigenous populations in order to take the land and settle on it permanently. Canada and the United States are both examples of settler colonial states. Settler colonialism refers to these ongoing genocidal practices, norms, policies and ideological perspectives that support and sustain colonial logics, such as racist stereotypes, residential schools, the over incarceration of Indigenous peoples and erasure of Indigenous worldviews and epistemologies.

2. While we recognize our intentional use of lowercase for white as a racial descriptor potentially risks reinforcing whiteness as the default, we have made this decision as part of our goal to decenter whiteness and delegitimize the ideologies of white supremacy.

3. For more information on the history of these methods and details about the various approaches under the T.O. umbrella, we encourage readers to explore: Boal (1979, 1992, 2001); Cohen-Cruz and Schutzman (1994); Howe et al. (2019); and Sajnani et al. (2021).