Seventeenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Social work educators must go beyond course content, concepts, and theories. Considering the ever-evolving social milieu globally, training social work students for practice requires future social workers to engage diversity and anti-Black racism. The scholarship of teaching and learning social work involves consciousness raising, plural epistemologies, cultures, and worldviews. Social workers must be broadminded to engage all races, social class, cultures, and identities. Similarly, educators are required to engage diverse learners, represented in the classroom. Thus, social work teaching is not just education, it is an art as well as a social science. The art of relationship building and sharing power to co-create the learning experience as well as the science of understanding, honouring, and harnessing the social and cultural capital of learners has the potential to produce globally conscious social workers who engage service users without doing them harm. This paper framed by critical/feminist and Afrocentric lens draws on studies with social work students to reflect on the process of designing and using a new anti-Black racism course to demystify Blackness for social work students in one Canadian university. Innovative methods including arts-based activities and Afrocentric sharing circles were used to explore the rationale for the course design, the uptake and insights gained through the process. The study makes a significant contribution to the body of knowledge on the scholarship of teaching and learning social work.