Integrating critical disability studies into social work education and practice: An Australian perspective

Abstract

This article surveys the potential for critical disability studies to enhance the teaching of social work education and practice. For disabled people social work can be a contradictory experience. Social workers are part of a ‘disabling’ as well as an ‘enabling’ profession and are increasingly coming under the critical gaze of disabled scholars and activists within the disability movement. As a result of a long association with medicalised paradigms of intervention, social work has either failed to take on board new ways of examining the disability experience or simply left disability as a marginal practice concern. Emancipatory paradigms, which place the views of disabled people as central to the change process, are replacing traditional ways of thinking. In this article, teaching disability is explored within the Australian context where market ideologies are heavily influencing the work of social work and other human service professionals. It reviews teaching an elective subject in disability to undergraduate social work students and concludes with implications for change in the social work curriculum, which should have direct impact on the practice of future social workers.

Keywords:

• social work
• disability
• education
• welfare reform
• governmentality

Notes

¹ In 2006, the Commonwealth Government took away the pension entitlement to disabled people who have the capacity to work at least 15 hours a week (Harding, Vu, and Percival 2005).