Evaluating Social Work Curriculum for Anti-Racist, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: The Curriculum Audit Tool

Overview: Social Work faculty have developed a stepped review process for auditing social work courses to identify gaps and needed areas of improvement as they pertain to inclusive classroom. The Curriculum Audit Tool (re-eduCATe) uses a standardized multi-step approach to provide feedback to social work educator and curriculum development.Proposal text: Contentious educators understand the importance of ensuring curriculum and readings uphold the values of the social work profession. Further future changes in the Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards Competency 2 are likely to reinforce the importance of Anti-Racist, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ADEI) curricula (CSWE, 2021). While these collective efforts are important, there is a lack of standardized methods for auditing curriculum to ensure that this alignment comes to fruition. Social Work faculty have developed a stepped review process for auditing social work courses to identify gaps and needed areas of improvement as they pertain to ADEI. The process combines the Social Justice Syllabus Design Tool (Taylor et al. 2019; SJSDT), CSWE Social Work competencies, and professor course evaluation questions. The Curriculum Audit Tool for Inclusion (re-eduCATe) method uses a standardized multi-step approach to provide feedback to social work educator and curriculum development teams regarding ADEI. The overall goal of the stepped process is to identify not only where changes are needed to align with ADEI pedagogy, but also to answer the “how” - thus facilitating improved equity and inclusion efforts in social work curriculum. Not only is this important for aligning curriculum with social work ethics, but it is also important for the well being of students (Davis, 2021). Re-eduCATe provides a total score; categorized as minimal improvement needed, moderate improvement needed, and urgent revisions needed as well as recommendations for targeted improvements.
Our workshop will introduce participants to the re-eduCATe method, provide a case example from the audits of MSW and DSW research courses, and share examples of implemented changes to these courses based on feedback from the tool. Participants will also have the opportunity to apply the re-eduCATe method to an example syllabus and discuss challenges that may arise using re-eduCATe in their own institutions. With a growing multidisciplinary emphasis on equity, diversity, and inclusion (Hartwell et al., 2017), re-eduCATe is grounded in human rights and social justice consistent with social work values but applicable to the overall academy.