Innovating with Social Work Values: Integrating Anti-Oppressive Social Work Design in Education, Research and Practice

The aim of this roundtable is to introduce social work practitioners, educators and researchers to the Anti-Oppressive Social Work Design framework (AOSWD). The speakers will provide tangible and systematic ways in which social workers can employ this framework within their classrooms, community-based research projects as well as within agencies. By integrating the AOSWD lens within daily practices, social workers can take leadership in strengthening and or creating client-centered solutions to address community issues such as poverty, child welfare, trauma, food insecurity, and homelessness, amongst others.

While the traditional social work practices have aimed to support communities that are vulnerable, they have often left them disempowered, and unable to break away from the oppression and inequities (Morgaine & Capous-Desyllas, 2015). With an increasing awareness of the role of systemic factors as essential determinants of sustained positive change, social workers across the world have been working towards developing frameworks to address client well-being from a person in environment perspective. The Anti-Oppressive Practice (Dominelli 1994;1996) though one such framework that is popularly accepted in the social work profession, does not have sufficient evidence for its implementation in the field. To support social workers, create anti-oppressive client-centered solutions there is a need to introduce tools and frameworks that systematically integrate concepts of social justice and empowerment. The AOSWD is one such tool that integrates Anti-Oppressive Practice and Human Centered Design Principles to focus on empathy building, co-creation of knowledge and implementation of solutions. This framework recognizes the need for innovation in social work education, research and practice that centers the voices of the clients in order to dismantle oppressive systems that disproportionately impact marginalized communities.

The roundtable will be led by three social work scholars that have successfully integrated AOSWD principles in social work education, research and practice. Their work is centered around the topics highlighted by the grand challenges of social work including: food insecurity, violence and trauma, child maltreatment, and healthcare access. The roundtable will include: 1) Introduction to framework: a presentation describing the theoretical framework of anti-oppressive social work design, 2) Case study for education: examples from the classroom of how to systematically integrate the AOSWD principles in social work education; 2) Case study for research: examples of community-based research projects that have used the AOSWD principles; 3) Case study for practice: stories from the field of developing and implementing programs and services as a result of the AOSWD. After completing this roundtable, participants will be able to describe anti-oppressive social work design phases of empathy building, co-creation and integration of feedback. Additionally, they will also be able to understand how this framework can be used in their own social work practice. Lastly, participants will be introduced to various tools (e.g. Model of Care, Mindset tools, Gift explosion, etc.) that they can use to successfully integrate this framework in their work.