WITHDRAWN: Freedom to Engage: Using Reflective Journaling to Promote Critical Consciousness for Social Work Practice with LGBTQ Communities

Background and Purpose: Few studies have elicited the voices of social work students about their professional growth in practice with LGBTQ clients. In particular, there has been little research about pedagogical strategies that help students develop the critical consciousness needed for anti-heterosexist social work practice. Through a qualitative analysis of students’ weekly reflective journals, this paper helps to fill this gap by examining the learning trajectories of MSW students in a 14-week course on social work with LGBTQ individuals and communities. The analysis was guided by two research questions: 1) How do MSW students evolve in their knowledge, feelings, and attitudes regarding LGBTQ individuals and communities? 2) How do MSW students use reflective journaling to support their learning about LGBTQ issues? 

Methods: As a low-stakes writing assignment, each student was required to write ten reflective journals over the semester (approximately two pages each) in which they shared their thoughts, feelings, and questions about the readings, class discussions, and their experience of the course material. On the last day of class, a faculty member unaffiliated with this course distributed informed consent letters inviting all 28 students who took this course to submit their reflective journals for analysis. Thirteen students volunteered. After the course instructor submitted semester grades, students emailed him their journals.

Journal entries (approximately 130) were analyzed by the instructor and his research assistant.  Using thematic analysis, initial codes were generated.  These codes were further analyzed and organized using a framework for analyzing content in reflective journals (Hubbs & Brand, 2010). Themes within and across journals were identified. Both analysts maintained an in-depth audit trail documenting their analytical steps and bracketing assumptions.  

Findings: Data analysis reveals that weekly reflective journaling can provide a key ingredient for creating a transformative learning environment. When given the opportunity to interact with course material in a forum free of outside judgment, students wrestled with uncomfortable thoughts and emotions over an extended period of time. This freedom to digest and discuss LGBTQ issues enabled students to engage in a cyclical approach to learning, circling back to ideas throughout the course, and confronting personal conflicts in their own time and at their own comfort level. 

Given this freedom to engage with what they wanted and how they wanted to, a number of students revealed evolutions of thought and shifts in their beliefs. These shifts were born of the freedom to risk exploring their own values and views about LGBTQ issues, many of which were steeped in religious, educational, gender, and cultural experiences.

Conclusion and Implications: When encountering content related to LGBTQ issues in the classroom, students may often feel uncomfortable discussing their beliefs, or may assume a more defensive posture in justifying their convictions, rather than being open to re-evaluating them. Low stakes writing assignments such as reflective journals afford MSW students the space and process to examine how their belief systems affect their interactions and openness surrounding LGBTQ issues. Such self-awareness can promote the critical consciousness needed to engage in anti-heterosexist social work practice.