Abstract

The Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work Registration Board requires all social workers to demonstrate competency in practice with diversity. This article briefly outlines findings from master’s research by one of the authors, Susan Beaumont, a Social Work practitioner in Aotearoa New Zealand, to contribute to understanding what prepares social work practitioners for engaging with diversity, from the perspectives of practitioners. For these practitioners, diversity is complex, hard to pin down, and arises out of particular understandings of identity—theirs and the service users they work with. We suggest that the ambiguity and frustration created by their profession’s use of a critically unexamined term—a term used to both encapsulate and mark competence with the multifariousness of human expression and identity—stems from reliance on a social identity perspective of diversity, which may limit praxis repertoire. These practitioners clearly identify that while their social work education supported reflection and critical thinking, it has not prepared them specifically for engaging with diversity; rather, it further “sharpened up” their existing skills. Beaumont’s findings show this can leave their practice with diversity characterized by interpersonal practice skills and their own life experiences and belief systems. The article briefly introduces the three key theoretical positions on diversity: social identity theory, critical theory, and post structuralist approaches. It then focuses on the key premises of social identity theory and identifies the gaps in this approach for informing practice with diversity. These practitioners are aware of the impacts of what they characterize as oppressive power on their diverse clients, and are suspicious that the term diversity may be a tool of this oppression but without the conceptual tools to shed a more critical and sociological light on diversity, what it is, and when and how it came about, these practitioners default to narrow interpretations of diversity We suggest that social work education on diversity would benefit from a more extended sociological lens to understanding diversity, identities, and the power implicated in these complex terms.