Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Reflecting and Implementing Anti-Racist Practice in Field Education

Overview: Ensuring anti-racist practice is at the heart of social work education, especially field education given its unique opportunity to bridge students’ academic and community experiences, thereby bringing anti-racist practice to life. Beginning from a foundation of honesty and accountability, field education can be a critical force in championing anti-racist practice.Proposal text: Clear connections exist between “global interconnections of oppression” and the need for social workers to apply their knowledge of social justice to advocate for human rights (CSWE Educational and Practice Standards, 2015; Competency 3). Anti-racist practice, a foundation for understanding and advancing human rights, is at the heart of social work education; however, many programs struggle with moving anti-racism from concept to reality, thus perpetuating White Eurocentric perspectives (Copeland & Ross, 2021; King-Jordan & Gil, 2021; Singh, 2019).

This problem is illustrated within field education, which sits at the intersection of historically privileged academia and the realities of social work practice settings (Levine & Murray-Lichtman, 2018). Many have criticized field education’s “professional volunteerism” model because completing required, unpaid internships favors privileged students, thereby perpetuating racism (Johnson et al., 2021). Marginalized students report not only experiencing racism and oppression inflicted by supervisors and agency staff but also suffering from inadequate supports to navigate these harms (Gooding & Mehrotra, 2021). Racism persists when field supervisors lack skill in bringing anti-racist practices to supervision and social work agencies fail to apply an anti-racist lens to their structure and agency culture (Hair, 2015; Mckenzie-Mavinga, 2020; McDermott et al., 2018; Wilcox et al., 2021). Amid the realities of crisis-driven practice during a pandemic, overtaxed field supervisors likely have limited bandwidth for increasing their knowledge of anti-racist practice, while university programs are likely reluctant to demand these critical volunteer educators complete anti-racism training (Davis & Mirick, 2021; Miller et al., 2018; Parga & Doyle, 2021).

To address these critiques, field educators must begin by holding up a mirror and reflecting on their own social position. Kishimoto (2018, p.543) argued, “self-reflection requires faculty to have the humility to know they are a work in progress, both as individuals and as professors/scholars/researchers.” Only with self-knowledge can field educators embark on the challenging, and often uncomfortable, examination of the ways policies and practices perpetuate racial harm (Odera et al., 2021). By starting with an internal focus and then partnering with students, field supervisors, and agencies, field educators can create an open dialogue in moving field programs toward anti-racist, anti-oppressive practices. (Pinkney, 2021).

The primary objective of this interactive workshop is to explore the importance of critical self-reflection and its power to transform field programs. Presenters will engage participants in defining anti-racist practices in field education, overviewing current literature on anti-racist pedagogy in field education, and illustrating the process of transforming field education using examples of the strategies and key challenges one school encountered when they applied an anti-racist lens to their field education program. Break out to small groups will facilitate participants’ critical self-reflection and discussion of strategies for overcoming barriers to implementing anti-racist practice in their field programs.