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Abstract
Given United State's leading position among international social work organizations, it is important that its standards of practice for diversity in social work education are examined. Using a nationwide sample of syllabi (N = 174) in the United States, the purpose of this study is to measure the extent to which various facets of diversity and social justice are incorporated into social work course syllabi. The study further assesses whether social justice content is integrated into diversity courses according to the Council on Social Work Education's 2001 and 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS). The goal is to better understand program adherence to diversity objects designed for social work education curriculum. An examination of course titles, syllabi content, and course objectives revealed a broad array of identified topics; however, terms such as culture/multicultural (79.2%), race (71.7%), diversity (68.2%), ethnicity (63.6%), gender (60.1%), oppression (57.8%), and gay/lesbian (56.1%) were addressed with greater frequency across all syllabi. In an assessment of adherence to 2001 and 2008 EPAS among syllabi, interrater agreement with the use of Kappa revealed modest agreement. Greater transparency in connecting EPAS with diversity course syllabi is an important step in the requirement to improve capability across programs. Implications for future research are discussed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
[1] We acknowledge that there are multiple definitions of social justice, but we use this brief definition for the sake of clarity for this presentation.
[2] One syllabus was only one page in length and did not contain a course description, but did contain course objectives. Therefore, information in Table is based on 173 syllabi.