The Arts in Social Work Education and Practice: Creating a More Just Society

Overview: By integrating the arts into education and practice, we can develop a new professional infrastructure that builds upon art’s unique benefits. This panel discusses historical and modern applications of arts-based practice, how it can enhance community development and engagement, increase well-being, and help us move toward a more just society.Proposal text: In this panel, we discuss a vision for engaging with art in social work education and practice that prioritizes two key concepts: (1) The arts offer important and vital ways of doing social work with people rather than for people, and (2) the arts offer relevant and just means for cultivating a praxis that extends beyond cultural competence (Pon, 2009), and is grounded in cultural humility (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998; Foronda et al., 2016, 2019).

The world is still actively wrestling with and reeling from the effects of multiple recent global crises and assaults on human rights. A health pandemic accompanied by economic and vocational crises, a global movement to stop police violence against Black and Brown bodies, an international reckoning with systemic white supremacy and legacies of settler colonization, and weather events and natural disasters highlight how the climate crisis is bearing down in every corner of the world. For millennia, communities around the world have relied on the arts to improve and maintain wellness, express grief and rage, and mobilize for advocacy, justice, and mutual aid (Addams, 1910; Alliance for California Traditional Arts, 2017; Cabot, 1914; Chambers, 1971; Kelly & Doherty, 2017; Travis & Deepak, 2011). This moment is no different. It is hard to imagine a more urgent time to consider how the profession of social work engages the arts to advance the mission of social justice, equity, and inclusion.

As this panel will demonstrate, engaging with art in social work leads to a fuller realization of the broad potential for a creative, client, and community-centered practice (Bos, 2018; Chamberlayne & Smith, 2019). It facilitates practice that is attuned to the full spectrum of social work at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. In addition, engaging with art prioritizes a broader range of epistemological and methodological approaches (Graham, 2018; Huss & Sela-Amit, 2019). It serves to deepen understanding and connection between worker and client as the arts are critical sites of identity expression and well-honed tools for expressing grief, rage, healing, and liberation for many populations social workers serve and may also personally identify with, including ethnic and racial groups, youth, the LGBTQ+ community, place-based communities, and many more (Ellis et al., 2020; Gonzalez, 2020; Kelly, 2019; Lanza, 2016; Levy & Travis, 2020).

In this spirit, this panel will examine social work, art, and the synergy of the two; examining what they offer each other and visioning their potential. Key to this vision is the prioritization of social worker-artists, a hybridized role that has surely existed since the origin of the profession, where social workers embrace and harness artistic talents in their practice (Travis, 2019). The panel will review historical and current relationships between the arts and social work, examine the possibilities of arts-based approaches for social work education, and present a vision for engaging the arts in social work education and practice that harnesses the synergistic potential social worker-artists bring to the profession.