Liberating Social Work Education: International, Indigenous, and Queer Crip Pathways to Pedagogical Transformation

Despite its commitment to social justice, social work education often perpetuates colonial knowledge systems and carceral logics through hierarchical, standardized, and professionalized Western pedagogies. This roundtable examines these dynamics within social work programs, using lived experience, embodied knowledge, and collective reflection to drive pedagogical transformation. Drawing from international, Indigenous, and queer crip (disabled) frameworks, a doctoral student, doctoral candidate, and early career tenure-track professor discuss the systems shaping their education, the impacts on knowledge production and research, and their visions for anti-colonial pedagogy. This roundtable calls for transforming social work education toward reciprocal, pluralistic, and liberation-based pedagogies emphasizing relational accountability, refusal, and radical imagination, with practical strategies for classroom instruction, curriculum design, and instructor-student relationships.

U.S. social work pedagogy often superficially engages cultural diversity while reinforcing Eurocentric models that limit genuine inclusion. An international perspective on decolonizing social work challenges this by advocating for cultural humility, reciprocal knowledge exchange, and the incorporation of Indigenous and non-Western epistemologies. This approach moves beyond neoliberalism and white saviorism, calling for curricula that address global crises such as material and emotional insecurity, climate change, and modern slavery. Decolonization requires a shift from performative diversity to a holistic, inclusive profession that authentically engages a range of global perspectives to tackle complex issues.

Indigenous pedagogies—grounded in kinship, storytelling, and collective responsibility— predate social work, yet remain largely unrecognized in dominant frameworks. Social work education requires a pedagogical reorientation. This involves incorporating accurate Indigenous histories and experiences, employing relational and narrative-based teaching methods, actively recruiting Indigenous faculty who model these pedagogies, and fostering educational environments where Indigenous knowledge systems shape learning experiences rather than remain supplemental.

Queer and trans crip frameworks provide vital critiques of how colonial pedagogical standards marginalize disabled, queer, and trans students through gender essentialism, queer erasure, ableism, saneism, and sizeism. These lenses challenge classroom norms of productivity, linear progression, and binary thinking often reinforced by rigid curricula and assessments in social work education. By rejecting these complicit norms, queer crip pedagogies advocate for flexibility, accessibility, and collective care, prioritizing diverse embodied experiences, interdependence, and access intimacy as essential components of teaching. These approaches disrupt educator neutrality, confront queer and disabled pathologization, reject carceral models, and foster learning environments that imagine alternative futures amidst ongoing harm.

This roundtable emerges from and is informed by the positionalities of its facilitators: a Nigerian international student with lived experiences in Ghana and South Africa; a white queer genderqueer descendent of 1860s German-Texan settlers on Penateka Comanche land; and a queer Afro-Indigenous (Kalina descendant via Trinidad/Venezuela) and white (English) researcher residing on occupied Ute territory. Through ongoing reflexive practice and dialogue, each presenter shares concrete pedagogical practices and critically engages with how their unique histories and identities shape and are shaped by their educational experiences, teaching methods, and mentorship approaches. Attendees will be invited to join this reflexive process by considering their own lineages, the colonial legacies they carry into social work education, and their roles in disrupting colonial legacies within their classrooms and teaching philosophies.