Innocence Lost and Suspicion Found: Do we Educate for or Against Social Work?
This paper concerns directions for education in critical social work. I have to confess at the outset that the topic unnerves me. I find that the more I teach, the more perplexed I become at the responsibility for social work education from a critical perspective. I think this is because my thought...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Windsor
2018-12-01
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| Series: | Critical Social Work |
| Online Access: | https://ojs.uwindsor.ca/index.php/csw/article/view/5628 |
| Summary: | This paper concerns directions for education in critical social work. I have to confess at the outset that the topic unnerves me. I find that the more I teach, the more perplexed I become at the responsibility for social work education from a critical perspective. I think this is because my thoughts about social work seem to be taking me farther and farther away from what is possible to teach and still call it social work. I would love the simplicity of teaching students to “do” social work. But I am deeply suspicious of the innocence of “doing social work.” So on my worst days, I believe that I am hiding my deepest suspicions about the project of social work from my dewy-eyed students who “just want to help” while I try tactfully to get them to be a little more suspicious of impulses that seem quite pure to them. On my best days, I sometimes think that chronic suspicion might be a form of action which can fuel some kind of radical democracy that resists the dire consequences for people of the current global order. The project of this paper is to trace my relation to the concepts of suspicion and innocence in social work and then raise questions about what this means for directions in social work education.
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| ISSN: | 1543-9372 |