(WITHDRAWN) Addressing Anti-Racism and Oppression in Social Work Education Programs

In 2020, the rise of anti-Asian racism due to the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the murder of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement, brought the long-standing issue of institutional racism to the forefront of the public’s consciousness. Combined with the ongoing reverberations of the 2016 presidential election, which led to an increase in racially and ethnically motivated hate crimes and a reemergence of deep-seated white supremacist ideology, the movement for racial justice became a focus of many institutions, including higher education. Within social work programs specifically, educators, students, and community partners alike attempted to navigate this violence and racial inequity personally and professionally. Justifiably, these events created calls to action within social work education and the profession to move beyond performative allyship. In June 2020, the Grand Challenges of Social Work announced the Grand Challenge to Eliminate Racism and in January 2022, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) released its Anti-Racism Statement calling for personal and professional action that takes a stance against racial hatred, bias, systemic racism, and oppression across all system levels. Accordingly, the Council of Social Work Education (CSWE) approved the new Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards in June 2022. CSWE uses Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) to ensure the quality of social work baccalaureate and master’s degree programs in the US. EPAS 2.0 explicitly calls for social work education programs to integrate and strengthen their programs’ commitment to anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion within the explicit and implicit curriculum. In response to these educational initiatives and the call for racial justice more broadly, the School of Social Work at San Diego State University committed to integrating anti-racist and anti-oppressive perspectives and actions into our BSW and MSW curricula. This workshop will provide participants the opportunity to learn about SDSU’s process for engaging in this work and the specific model the School is using to restructure the curriculum using an anti-racist and anti-oppressive lens. We will frame the workshop by reporting the findings of a rapid scoping literature review we conducted to determine how anti-racist or anti-oppressive perspectives are currently being integrated into US social work education. Participants will learn about how we engaged in the scoping review process and how we utilized the findings to develop a rubric to assess existing syllabi for anti-racist or anti-oppressive content. We will also review the systematic manner by which we evaluated all syllabi in the BSW and MSW programs, and the implementation of phase one of a multi-phase process for integrating anti-racist and anti-oppressive content throughout the BSW and MSW explicit curriculum. Additionally, workshop attendees will get the opportunity to engage in discussion about how social work education programs and the profession should be working towards racial justice. We also invite attendees to bring their own experiences of similar curriculum change efforts to the discussion.