Week 8

Week 8 Blog

My colleagues once again provided insight to my further investigations.  Thank-you all for that!  I appreciate that Brenda and Anna made a connection with the transformational piece, what I will refer to as my reflexive-therapeutic (Payne, 2005) view of social work. Jules on the other hand said WHAT??? I don’t get your claim and I don’t see how you are connecting it with Narayan’s article.  That is a pretty clear statement to me that I need to work on it if I want it to be clear to all… and yes, I do want to be clear to all. I value your input and look forward to your thoughts about this week’s post.

Here’s what I was trying to say. My claim is that relationship is key in social work. I was complicating it a little last week by adding the part about power. I was attempting to show how power is inherent in relationships and that if relationships are key in social work, than it is necessary to pay attention to power or power relations. I was using Narayan’s article to show examples of how when we pay attention to power in relationships, we can achieve social work goals of a just society. This fits into social work education because if power is inherent in relationships, then that includes the classroom and all aspects of social work education, teacher/student, student/service user, research/teaching, university/community. At the same time, I was looking for linkages between your thoughts and mine, where identity and epistemology fit and well… it came out disjointed.

In hindsight, I will say that not only was I not explicit enough in the explanation of what I was trying to demonstrate or argue but that my evaluation of the claim requires work.  So, I went back to the Narayan article to see if I could do a better job at demonstrating how the article supports the claim and realized immediately the contradictions. There is some consistency between what Narayan says with what we know and that support my claim. There are also inaccuracies, assumptions and the question of relevance.

Consistency – Is there consistency between the claim and what we know? – Is relationship key in social work? Well, this article does not directly answer this question (relevance) so this is where I stray because I added the power piece. I look at the relationship between Freire, Ghandi and social work values. And yes, there is consistency in some ways, for example, under people-centered, values such as humanism and injustice (social justice) are core values for all three. Faith in people, despite oppression is also consistent between all three with the notion that people have the “potential to create their own lives” (p. 194). Some of the inconsistencies begin to show here when you consider Freire, Ghandi and social work practice from an epistemological and in some ways a methodological perspective. 

Freire and Ghandi both present views that fall in some ways within a constructivist paradigm (reflexive-therapeutic) and in some ways fall within the critical theories paradigm (socialist-collectivist). And although the methods may appear to be more peaceful and transformative, reflecting self-development (reflexive-therapeutic), the major focus for Freire and Ghandi is societal change (socialist-collectivist) or critical theories paradigm. Social work, on the other hand, has primarily focused on individualist-reformist and somewhat on reflexive-therapeutic and far less so on socialist-collectivist – social justice through social action.

For me this raises the question of as a profession, are our values consistent with our actions? What is the relationship between these two things? Can we say we believe in social justice and then focus on fixing the individual, through individual counselling that sees people from a deficit position, needing to be cured by us, the professional? How many of our social work practice theories that we rely on in our daily work fall within this positivist paradigm (psychodynamic, task-centered, crisis intervention, CBT, systems)?  

I think there is a fair bit of consistency between the value of non-violence and Freire, Ghandi and social work so I am going to skip to the last value identified by Narayan, social responsibility. In some ways, there is consistency in belief between the three with social responsibility in that it is viewed as having the ability to demonstrate power in relationships. For example, in social work education, social responsibility can lead to teaching through social action – demonstration projects, academic activism and expressing solidarity with marginalized groups. Additionally, people from marginalized groups can gain access to education through scholarship (in all disciplines). Freire refers to phrases such as praxis and conscientization, resulting in the power of the people to make and remake themselves, their situation and their reality. There is a relationship between social responsibility and a just society, hence I say, relationship is key in social work.

Inaccuracies and assumptions – Through my justification of my claim, I make further statements that are not necessarily justified, could be assumptions and may be inaccurate. When I say, for example, that the majority of social work practice theories fall within a particular social work view, individualist -reformist , reflexive-therapeutic, socialist-collectivist (Payne, 2005), I am relying on one author’s way of thinking or organizing practice theories, Malcolm Payne.  This could be completely inaccurate from another author’s view. Truthfully, I have no good justification for believing Payne except that it resonated with my own values and beliefs, so I accepted it to be a reasonable source to quote and use. The assumption here is that Payne’s work is valid and reliable, when I do not know that for sure. Another assumption here is that organizing practice theories into particular categories that I then translated into paradigms, is accurate or acceptable or the ways other people will accept them. I could be really wrong.  If on the other hand, I do not accept work that fits with my own values and beliefs, what does that say about my own thinking? Is it justified?

Relevance – As noted above, this article in some ways does not answer my claim directly, relationships are key in social work, but I have stretched it to make some linkages and connections. They fit for me. The question is, do they fit for the reader?

Michael and Pierre added to my claim, “the standard of methodology will help us determine whether or not we know that relationships are key in the profession of social work”. This is tricky. How would we know? Is it possible to objectively observe, using the scientific method, to determine that relationships are key (quantitative) or do we have focus groups and individual interviews  (qualitative) to hear people’s views about whether or not relationships are key. Do we choose a mixed methods design and triangulate the data to convince ourselves of the study’s rigor? Have there been studies on the various kinds of relationships, beyond teacher/student, SW/service user? Such as, the relationship between social responsibility and a just society? Do we have any ‘evidence’ of a just society with which to compare? And if there were studies, would we be able to transfer that knowledge over society as a whole or only to a particular population? Making this claim becomes more complicated as it is explored and I may have to settle with what fits for my values. This of course leads into our next section, ethics. What are the ethical implications of what I just said?