Shifting the Critical Gaze: An Investigation of Critical Whiteness and Its Promise for Social Work Education

Background: The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) mandates that social work students be able to demonstrate anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice, along with cultural humility via the acknowledgment of bias, power, and privilege. However, social work education lacks a unified approach for achieving this, and there is much debate among social work scholars about best educational practices and theoretical approaches. Informed by the scholarship of Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), the aim of my research was to gain insight from a diverse sample of experienced social work educators about how they frame the topic of racialized oppression in their classrooms and curricula, and how they identify/respond to whiteness in their classrooms and curricula. My research questions are:

How do social work professors structure and frame course content and classroom conversation surrounding racialized oppression?

How do social work professors identify, experience, and respond to whiteness in their classrooms and curricula?

Methods: I conducted semi-structured interviews with eight social work professors who have been teaching in the field for five years or more, and teach primarily in-person. Participants have been recruited via an invitational email, sent to all full-time social work professors in the state of Minnesota (email addressed were gathered via university websites). Participants were diverse in gender identity, institution, race/ethnicity, and life experience. Interview prompts contained (among other things) questions about how professors see their role in conversations about racialized oppression, what theoretical approaches or frames inform the manner in which they teach about racialized oppression, how professors respond to challenging conversations, how professors identify/conceptualize whiteness, and how they respond to whiteness when it is perceived. Data was analyzed using Braun & Clarke’s (2016) six phases of thematic analysis, using emergent coding.

Results: Among the findings were that some professors believed self-reflection to be the cornerstone of antiracist pedagogy, while others felt the utility of self-reflection is over-stated. Some participants believed focusing on race/whiteness was vital, while others felt emphasizing racism eroded solidarity. Participants also had vastly different conceptions of whiteness. Virtually none of participants recalled being taught how to manage conversations/conflict surrounding race in their MSW programs. Additionally, almost all participants felt that social work classrooms were spaces of deep transformational change for students. Many participants emphasized the importance of cultivating community and solidarity within the classroom, and many also expressed themes of protection and safety—either toward students, themselves, or the field of social work as a whole.

Implications: Despite CSWE’s expectation that social work students graduate with the ability to demonstrate anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice, cultural humility, and acknowledge bias, power, and privilege, this study highlighted vast disagreement about how to accomplish these aims. Furthermore, despite CWS scholarship emphasizing the importance of examining/dismantling whiteness, some participants struggled to conceptualize whiteness--which would make implementing CWS-centered pedagogical approaches difficult. More research needs to be done to both examine the utility of CWS as a pedagogical frame, and to understand what further supports, resources, or education social work professors may need to better achieve current CSWE mandates.