Collaborative Anti-Oppression Curriculum Development

Overview: This panel discusses curriculum changes in an MSW program to advance justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, and focuses on anti-oppressive social work practice. We will describe changes to curricula, discuss planning and implementation processes, summarize evaluation efforts and goals, and highlight policies and practices focused on overcoming manifestations of oppression.Proposal text: This panel will describe the collaborative, multi-year process of developing and implementing JEDI-focused (Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) curriculum changes, preliminary evaluation data, lessons learned and plans to continue.

In response to student, faculty, and staff advocacy, our school created the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Furthermore, multiple teams simultaneously developed, piloted, and implemented changes to our curriculum, required of all foundation students:
1. An online pre-requisite on the history of oppression and resistance
2. A 3-credit first-semester course on structural oppression and implications for social work
3. A field seminar
The pre-requisite introduces students to: the area's history of oppression and resistance movements, theoretical approaches to understanding oppression, and tools to engage in classroom and seminar discussions of power, privilege, and oppression. An introductory version of this pre-requisite is also available to university leadership and community members.

The 3-credit course encourages members to interrogate the causes, manifestations, impacts, and means of overcoming forms of structural oppression. Members explore social identity in context of structural oppression, ways dominant narratives influence global and self-perception, and ways some human differences are given social meaning used to divide people, and hide and justify systems of exclusion, exploitation, and marginalization. The course challenges members to question constructs considered natural and inevitable and to embrace more liberatory, equitable, and just ways to practice social work and organize social life.

The field seminar prioritizes concepts from Rx Racial Healing (Christopher, 2018), The 6 Pillars of Brave Space (Stubbs, 2019), and the SHARP framework (Shaia, 2019). Students and instructors examine the cultural impact of what is known and taught about social work practice, how this integrates with them personally and professionally, and implications of structural oppression for social work intervention.

Each of the curriculum changes are intended to build on and support each other and foster student understanding and skills to be deepened in advanced course and field work. Development and implementation centralized input and feedback from multiple community stakeholders to ensure thoughtful, embraced, and effectively implemented changes; and included multiple presentations about the process, pilot versions of the seminar and course, and reviews of syllabi and course materials. This inclusive approach continues.

We employed multi-method evaluation of changes to the explicit and implicit curriculum, including pre- and post- knowledge assessments of students, course evaluations, student feedback surveys, and focus groups.

Preliminary evaluation data indicate these curriculum changes enhance student knowledge and skills to practice anti-oppressive social work, support JEDI, and improve instructors’ navigation of challenging discussions. Students affirmed field seminar includes applied JEDI discussion to process challenges related to power, privilege, and oppression in social work practice. Pre-requisite data show extensive self-reported change for students with varying levels of knowledge, understanding and comfort discussing oppression-related topics. Other foundation instructors report students more readily engage with JEDI and anti-oppression content, and course evaluations indicate instructors have increased their JEDI content. Intentional and sustained focus on overcoming structural oppression and its manifestations encourages all to challenge these structures both within the school and in field agencies.