Antiracism and Curricula Review: Challenges, Strategies, and Outcomes for Schools of Social Work

Overview: This panel will present our school’s 2-year journey through an antiracist curricular review. We detail our processes of learning, instrument identification, review design, and outcome assessments. These presentations will aid social work schools in leveraging key strategies and learning from the challenges in conducting their antiracist curricular efforts.Proposal text: When George Floyd was murdered in full public view, that event alongside the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbrey inspired a social justice movement that also resulted in an acceleration of the reexamination of the curriculum in our school of social work. Subsequently, we have worked as a faculty to identify and apply an antiracist lens to our curriculum, believing that racism creates the problems we, as social workers, intervene with in communities and with individuals, families, and groups. We further recognize that our failure to address racism in a coordinated and systemic manner would ultimately undermine what we are teaching our students and trying to accomplish as social workers. We concurred with CSWE’s Center for Diversity and Social and Economic Justice, “More than about content, teaching from an antiracism perspective is about pedagogy, involving the restructuring of concepts, curriculum, and classroom learning environment. It calls for classrooms where educators and students form a true community of learners. During this period especially, in which many students are concerned that important content on racism is being left out, a restructuring of pedagogy offers the opportunity for students to help shape their learning according to their goals.” (https://www.cswe.org/Centers-Initiatives/Centers/Center-for-Diversity/Educator-Resource/July-2021).

Indeed, we heard these legitimate concerns and calls for urgent responsiveness from our students as well. In response, as a faculty we began by spending an academic year (AY2021) collectively educating ourselves on modern conceptions of racism and antiracism—a shift from our prior efforts around more general anti-bias training. As a faculty and staff we committed to reading and discussing Ibrahim Kendi’s book “How to be Antiracist,” and allocated 1 hour of each faculty meeting as a discussion and planning time. Using this book as foundational, we recognized racism as underpinning other forms of oppression that we needed to address as well. Further, our faculty and doctoral students formed corresponding Anti-Racist Learning Collaboratives that met biweekly last year, and engaged in topical and applied discussions of race and social work. Following these learnings, we developed tools to assess our generalist, specialization, and elective syllabi from an antiracist perspective. Data from these assessments are being entered into Qualtrics and are being used to update our syllabi and to assist us further in evaluating our curriculum.

Beyond sharing our journey, this panel presentation will provide participants with the structure and processes we have used in our assessment, including how we learned and those topics with which we continue to be challenged. Further, we will review with participants syllabi assessment instruments used in our accredited programs, as well as process and outcome data regarding our syllabi and curriculum derived from these assessments. We will also discuss how we have restructured concepts, our curriculum, and our implicit learning environment.

This panel presentation will have implications for curriculum design and delivery in our accredited programs. Participants will leave this panel presentation with concepts, processes, and tools to begin an antiracist assessment of their own curriculum.