Social workers as double agents: critical inquiry, social work education, and the youth question

ABSTRACT

Contemporary iterations of the youth question present social work with a generative challenge to imagine the education needs of youth as social work students, and at the same time, to imagine the intervention needs of youth as service users. This paper engages this challenge through an empirical case that confronted us with our own preconceived understandings of young people and social work: a funded project to support the program evaluation capacity of a national network of youth centers in Canada. Working through three tensions that emerged in this work—(1) assumptions about youth and workers, (2) participation as a best-practice, and (3) how local data collection practices are networked to ambiguous, ongoing social processes—we reflect project learning and youth studies literature together to explore the possibilities of ‘critical inquiry skills’ in social work education. As we develop the concept here, critical inquiry skills are a means to encourage young people to see themselves as simultaneously within and outside of the categories and approaches they are taught and subjected to, and by extension, to invite and support newcomers to make the discipline and profession their own.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical inquiry skills
• uncertain practice
• youth question
• hybrid knowledge
• critical bifocality
• double agents

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their support of this project (File #890-2015-0046). In addition, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of Rob Shields (U of Alberta), Tom Murphy (Distil Mobile), Will White and Les Voakes (Youth Centres Canada).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [890-2015-0046].

Notes on contributors

Tina E. Wilson

Tina E. Wilson is a doctoral candidate in social work at McMaster University.

Sarah L. Todd

Sarah L. Todd is a Professor in the School of Social Work at Carleton University.

Katherine Occhiuto

Katherine Occhiuto is a doctoral candidate in social work at Carleton University.

J. Z. Garrod

J. Z. Garrod is an instructor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University.