A Peculiar-Evil: Politics, Pedagogy, & the Marginalization of Conservative Social Work Students

Background & Purpose:

Recently, social work educators have begun to examine the correlation between social work ideologies, praxis, and the cultural and political delineation of space. However, these efforts have largely prioritized the educational experiences of racial and ethnic minorities while promoting an ideological identification with a more progressive/liberal political agenda. As such, social work has not only aligned itself with a specific political position, but it has situated itself in ways that, while empowering for some, run the risk of marginalizing more ideologically conservative social work faculty, staff, and students. However, despite their increased exposure to marginalization, there has been little discussion regarding how more conceptually conservative social work students engage, manage, and understand their experiences within an educational space heavily influenced by the praxis of progressive interpretations and conceptions of anti-racism, diversity, equity, inclusion, and a just-society.

Methods:

This essay explores the educational-realities of 13 graduate-level social work students who self-identify as religiously or politically conservative, represent eight distinct undergraduate institutions, three US regions, and possess a bachelor's in social work from properly accredited institutions. This study utilizes Qualitative Phenomenological Analyses and the concepts of Space, Praxis, and Person-in-environment to explore and excavate social works' unspoken political postures and their impacts on participants' educational experiences.

Results:

Participants expressed shared experiences of Cultural-neglect, Cultural-denigration, and Cultural-imposition. Sub-ordinant experiences included minimal cultural-representation, cultural-marginalization, a limited sense of cultural-community, cultural-misrepresentation, cultural-demonization, a lack of felt safety, the pressure to uncritically accept dominant cultural values, limited space for cultural-difference and cultural-indoctrination.

Conclusions & Implications:

Assuming the legitimacy of participants' expressed experiences, social work education may be engaging in a set of pedagogical practices that insulate its unspoken ideological assumptions from intellectual collisions with, and critiques by, alternative social, political, and cosmological views.

If true, social work education must contend with how its promotion of conceptual insularity within pedagogical spaces contributes to ad-hominem moralizations, the uncritical promotion of preferred ideological conclusions, and the omission and distortions of alternative and non-supportive perspectives. In addition, social work education must also address how such acts deny students and faculty the opportunity to engage in the infinite forms of intellectual maturation that can only be generated by collisions with a heterogeneity of perspectives, epistemologies, intellects, social vantages, and conceptions of a just-society.