Radical challenges for social work education

 I am delighted to see this special edition of Social Work Education: the international journal, through to publication, having acted as guest editor before my appointment as co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal in March 2020.

It is my passionate belief that a radical approach to social work education is needed now more than ever. My own research suggests that our current generation of students appears to have internalised a neoliberal narrative of individualisation and personal blame (Fenton, 2019a). Adopting the position that a service user is solely responsible for the difficult circumstances they find themselves in, and thus responding with behavioural or ‘correctional’ solutions is simply not doing social work. Social work’s core values are based upon an understanding that structures and circumstance affect people—people do not make choices in a vacuum. And some circumstances, most profoundly poverty and inequality, can lead to grim unhappiness, stress and the potential for real problems. It is incumbent upon us, as social work educators, to make sure students critically understand this.

This special edition begins with an article from Carey who introduces the serious problem we, as educators in neoliberal UK universities, are facing and the ‘precarious future’ of the social work profession. Next, Cox et al describe a scoping review that looks at theoretical orientations of programmes within the social work literature. They found that the theoretical frameworks were mainly critical and applied in a piecemeal way. Interestingly, they found that there were no whole curriculum theoretical orientations arguing for class based analysis and that poverty and inequality were ‘backgrounded.’ I have highlighted this because it appears to echo Nancy Fraser’s ongoing concern that attention to issues of ‘recognition’ (identity features such as race and gender) as a source of injustice have eclipsed attention to economic matters such as poverty (distribution) (Fraser, 2003). My own and others’ research (Fenton, 2019a; Grasso et al., 2017; Twenge, 2018 for example) has also highlighted that the current generation of students are much better at thinking about diversity and are more tolerant than previous generations, but are more punitive in terms of poverty, unemployment and economic hardship. This makes the dearth of class or poverty based analyses concerning.

Herrero and Charnley compare the teaching of social justice and human rights in the classroom, as a counter-balance to neoliberal narrative, in Spain and England. Although they found some differences, they also found useful commonalities that might help us as educators withstand the pervasive neoliberal framing of social problems.

These articles explore facets of the contemporary picture of social work education. We can now turn to the remainder of the articles that provide us with some excellent examples and suggestions for radical practice.

Gale and Edenborough again turn to Nancy Fraser for a theoretical framework to analyse the experiences of group based projects for young people in Australia. They found that the ‘misrecognition’ of the young people led to an erosion of their ‘parity of participation’ as did the confounding effects of managerialism. Morley and Stenhouse’s article demonstrates the very productive use of critical reflection, based on critical pedagogy. The theory’s focus on power is used to great effect in helping a student in Australia deconstruct a critical incident in a mental health setting. The article from Baynesagn et al helps the reader understand a very profound example of decolonising the social work curriculum in Ethiopia. The challenges of doing this are well contextualised within the particular historical development of social work education within Ethiopia.

Using creative modalities in social work education in Australia is the subject of O’Keeffe and Assoulin’s article. The authors contend that using modalities such as art therapy can reduce power imbalances because spoken discourses are at risk of containing ‘blaming’ conceptions of problems. Service users can use creative modalities to, for example, illustrate their own relationships with societal structures. Aaslund and Woll give an example of students in Norway working directly with housing tenants which increased their critical thinking and their structural awareness. This is so important in the light of, for example, Sheppard et al.’s (2018) study that social work graduates were poorer critical thinkers than a population normative sample.

Finally, Bussey, Jamal and Sherika’s article looks at a whole curriculum approach based on radical social work. Seeing the micro-macro divide as false, their model starts with critical consciousness raising so that students do not perpetuate harmful and oppressive narratives about the individualisation of blame.

So, although responses may differ—traditional radical and activist approaches; a more lazy radical approach where activism is not emphasised (being radical in small ways in practice, Fenton, 2019b); or critical postmodern practice with a focus on positionality in structures of power determined by identity features such as race or gender—what they all have in common is the absolute imperative that students are helped to move away from practice that is inherently neoliberal, underpinned by a narrative of individualisation and blame. Those practices are playing out in practice where service users feel as if they are treated as ‘less than human’ (Smithson & Gibson, 2017) and where there is a growing ‘authoritarian desire to responsibilise parents regardless of their economic and social circumstances’ (Rogowski, 2015, p. 105). We need to equip our new generation of social workers to withstand the pressure they may feel to adopt a neoliberal approach once in practice, and this is quite a challenge given their increased internalisation of the narrative of individualisation and the consequent ease with which they might conform. The importance of facing this challenge is the golden thread that runs through this special edition, best summed up by Bailey and Brake (1975) who describe the casework strand of radical practice as that which does not support ‘the ruling class hegemony’. Social work education must be a key player in making that anti-neoliberal social work a reality.