"Components of Structural Racism Should be Infused into Everything We Learn": Embedding Structural Competence in Social Work Education

CSWE Educational Policy 2.0 requires that "social work programs provide the context for students to develop a commitment to dismantling systems of oppression, such as racism."(CSWE, 2022). Vital to this discipline-wide initiative is structural competence. Structural competence refers to one's ability to understand and discern institutional and societal factors influencing an individual's well-being (Metzel & Hanzen, 2014). Structural competency in social work education is critical in ensuring that students understand and implement an anti-oppressive and anti-racist lens at an institutional level at the beginning of their engagement in the social work discipline. This roundtable seeks to present the findings of a qualitative examination of students' structural competency in an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis study. The study explores the experiences of a cohort of MSW students (N=8) as they develop structural competence through a learning journey in a special topics course that incorporated problem-posing instructional strategies; critical, engaged, and abolitionist pedagogies; and the study of specific systemic harms as a lens to identify the structural linkages that perpetuate oppressive systems. Using interpretive phenomenological analysis, this study findings displayed the importance of one's positionality in the framework of society as they engage this topic; the value of creating a learning space conducive to learning and challenging one's understanding of oppressive factors at a structural level; and the need to critically reflect about the complicity of social work education and practice in furthering oppression institutionally. This study adds to gaps in literature examining the process and scope of growing in structural competence in social work education and provides a framework for further research and initiatives toward implementing structural competence in social work education. This robust discussion will be divided into four segments guided by each presenter. The first presenter will provide an introduction to the concept of structural competency and its importance in social work education. The second presenter will provide a background for the study, review the methodology, and discuss an overview of the results. The third presenter will moderate a discussion on the implementation of structural competency within the classroom setting. The fourth presenter will engage participants in a collective discussion on how they can implement multiple means of building such competency in their pedagogy in creatively adaptable ways around various social work courses.