While there is mounting research on the well-known white founders of social work, documentation of Black social work pioneers and their contributions is scarce -- in both social work education and the broader telling of the profession's history. Given the systemic exclusion of Black social workers in the dominant narrative of social work history,…

This article critically examines the fulsome embrace of Antiracist, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ADEI) rhetoric by social work institutions in the United States, identifying historic precedents and contemporary implications. We examine theories that captivated the profession in the last half century and the corollary political developments.…

Social work education is at a crossroads with the release of the 2022 Educational Policy Administration Standards (EPAS, 2022), which emphasize anti-racist practice. To teach anti-racist social work one must be prepared to use anti-racist pedagogical practices and be supported to do so institutionally. Freire (2020) proposes that education be a…

The heart can care but be misled by fine sounding words that obscure harms. Discovering harms is often hard work, for example determining exactly what outcomes clients experience in agencies and how to improve these, what avoidable errors social work educators and practitioners make and how to minimize these, what students actually learn and use…

The 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) from the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) definitively identifies anti-racism as a necessary component of social work education. This change supports an effort to ensure that coming generations of social workers are more than culturally competent, but rather actively anti-racist…

Social work education, practice and research is rightly composed of a wide variety of behavioral and social science theories, practice perspectives and models, and various ethical principles and values. Positions that lend themselves to empirical analysis will, over time and with appropriate research, sort themselves out into views that are…

Debates over the nature of social work education are not new. What is new, however, comes from the Council on Social Work Education's (CSWE) injection of critical pedagogy into social work education through "anti-racist" and "anti-oppressive" competencies laid out in the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards…

The purpose of this philosophical liberal critique of the 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) is to highlight the danger of using a single lens perspective in social work education in addressing discrimination, racism, inequality and other forms of injustices. A brief review of the concept of social justice illustrates how…

Advocacy for social justice is a core duty of the social work profession. Social injustice, oppression, and marginalization in the United States demand that social workers critically evaluate and address systemic oppression, in the profession, society, and social work education. This study sought to explore the attitudes of social work students in…

On October 7, 2023, Hamas and Jihad terrorists broke through Israel's security border walls surrounding Gaza and launched an attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers in the kibbutz and moshav communities and army bases located in the Gaza Envelop area, adjacent to the Gaza Strip, breaching an existing cease-fire. Approximately 1,200 people…

Principles of diversity and difference are and have historically been, essential to social work education. However, preparing students with the knowledge, awareness, and skills of anti-racist and anti-oppressive practices has been less central in social work education until recently. In June 2022, the Council on Social Work Education issued new…

Drawing from my experiences as an American-Israeli Jewish woman in social work academia, I use this paper to reflect upon the ways in which the Council on Social Work Education's newly-mandated anti-racist and anti-oppressive paradigms are problematic for the future of the social work profession. While it is important for social workers to address…

In this article, I argue that antiracist political activism modeled after the teachings of critical race theory (CRT) and critical social justice theory (CSJ) more generally, is an unethical form of pedagogy and clinical praxis that will likely damage members of society by producing incompetent mental health professionals. If the premises and…