Centering Racial Equity in a BSW Program: What We’ve Learned in Five Years

ABSTRACT

In response to the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump and calls for antiracist action from activists and communities of color, our Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) program embarked on a process of curriculum revision. In this article, we describe our efforts to center critical and Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) scholarship and to better align our curriculum with the experiences of students of color. While we have drawn from feminist and critical race theories, we have also borrowed concepts from literatures not typically associated with antiracism work, such as policy implementation and leadership/management. We present our ongoing work as a case study of, and methodology for, systematic social work curriculum change to promote racial equity and justice.

In the past 2 years, economic and social disparities have deepened, “exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic” (Rosen & Batcheck, 2021, section 1, para 1). Throughout 2020 and 2021, police violence against Black people, COVID-19, and an extended economic crisis dramatically increased the visibility of structural racism and White supremacy in the United States. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, potentially the largest social movement in history (Buchanan et al., 2020), deepened public conversation about the intergenerational consequences of racism and slavery. Demanding the abolition of endemic anti-Black state violence, the movement has brought attention, in real time, to the disproportionate loss of lives and livelihoods to COVID-19 in Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, especially among women of color (Cohn & Quealy, 2020). Within the social work profession, abolition organizing and the events of the past 2 years have occasioned a wave of ideological reckoning. As social work educators, we are called, with new urgency, to explicitly articulate our stance on racial equity in social work and social work education (Ladhani & Sitter, 2020).

For some 40 years, social work scholars from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States have advocated for critical, liberatory, and progressive approaches to social work, including antioppressive practice (cf., Baines, 2007; Dominelli, 1998; Dominelli & Campling, 2002; Morgaine & Capous-Desyllas, 2014; Moosa-Mitha, 2005; Mullaly & West, 2018; Payne, 2005), intersectional feminism (Mehrotra, 2010), critical race theory (CRT) and pedagogy (Abrams & Moio, 2009; Ortiz & Jani, 2010; Razack & Jeffery, 2002); critical social work (Bryson, 2019; Fook, 2016; Garrett, 2021; Gray & Webb, 2012), human rights (Ife, 2012; Werkmeister & Garran, 2016), and others. These scholarly contributions, and the larger body of work they represent, have shaped the field in profound ways, building a critical theoretical base. More theoretical than pragmatic, and fairly mixed in terms of approach, this literature has typically deferred to social work programs, departments, and schools to implement curricular change aimed at promoting racial equity.

Toward this end, in this article, we describe key steps our Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) program took, between 2016 and 2019, to center racial equity in our curriculum. After reviewing relevant literature on antiracist curriculum change efforts, we briefly describe the theoretical underpinnings of our curriculum change model, highlight important implementation practices, and review facilitators and barriers to doing this work in our institutional and geographic contexts. We share this imperfect and iterative work in the hope we will contribute to social work education’s collective fund of antiracist knowledge and strategy. In this undertaking, we echo Basham et al. (1997), who described the lengthy and uneven process by which students and faculty, in 1994, galvanized Smith College School for Social Work to become an antiracist institution: We “ … present a journey that is neither a grand success nor a morality tale, recognizing that there is a distance to go” (p. 565).

Social work education and racial equity

While definitions of racial equity abound, for the purpose of this article, we define racial equity as an aspirational condition that will be achieved when racialized injustice, in all its discursive and material manifestations, is eradicated. Like antiracist practice, which targets “the institutional and structural nature of racism and how it is reproduced in state institutions, including social work education and practice contexts” (Singh, 2019, p. 6), racial equity is avowedly structural. It advances practices and policies that, together, redress and repair historical harms wrought by systemic racism and work to eliminate present day inequities. This definition of racial equity follows from an apprehension of race not as biologically given, but as socially and historically constructed through the process of racialization. Importantly, while race is constructed, the “consequences of racial categorization are real, as the ideology of race has become embedded in our identities, institutions, and culture, and is used as a basis for discrimination and racial profiling” (National Education Association, 2021).

Notwithstanding a very recent “epidemic of signification” (Treichler, 1999) around antiracism and racial equity, our professional organizations can be characterized as ambivalent toward racial equity (Ladhani & Sitter, 2020). Until 2020, neither the National Association of Social Workers (NASW)’s Code of Ethics nor the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE)’s educational standards explicitly addressed racial equity or antiracism. Since the initial submission of this article, in February 2020, two significant developments have taken place. First, the NASW reinstated “Cultural Competency” as standard 1.05 (b) of the Code of Ethics, replacing “Cultural Awareness and Social Diversity,” which was adopted in 2017. While this change seems a bit out of step with the current moment (see below for a discussion of this framework), NASW also named racism. As of June 2021, Standard 1.05 encourages social workers to “take action against oppression, racism, discrimination, and inequities” (NASW, 2021).

Second, in April 2021, CSWE made significant amendments to its proposed 2022 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards. Competency 2, which was initially slated to change from “Engage Diversity and Difference in Practice” to “Engage Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Practice” (CSWE, 2021), recently became “Engage Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Practice.” This competency includes the most definitive antiracist guidance yet to appear in U.S. social work: “Demonstrate anti-racist social work practice at the individual, family, group, organizational, community, research, and policy levels, informed by the theories and voices of those who have been marginalized” (CSWE, 2021, p. 8). For U.S. social work to adopt an openly antiracist stance is historically unprecedented. For CSWE to uplift marginalized epistemologies is perhaps even more meaningful, as it endorses curricular and scholarly efforts that could be far-reaching in their effect on the profession.

U.S. social work is not alone in its historical diffidence about antiracism. Moreover, examples from other countries suggest that if not explicitly embraced, antiracism can be sidelined both by “radical” and “liberal” approaches. For example, writing in a Canadian context, Ladhani and Sitter (2020) lamented the “declining prominence of anti-racist practice” in social work education (p. 55). They note that although Canadian and British social work educators, respectively, convened task forces in the 1980s to develop antiracist trainings and standards for antiracist practice, the subsequent adoption of antioppressive practice eroded this focus on racism per se:

Since the shift to AOP (anti-oppressive practice), the lack of explicit visibility of anti-racism within social work education and institutional policy has been noted, as has the increased use of diversity and equity terminology. … Removing antiracism from the vernacular has implications for our understanding of racism as a construct, causing one to question if racism can be well understood in the absence of its opposite. (p. 55)

Writing about the UK social work context, Singh (2019) named the tension between antiracist social work practice as “a radical and oppositional project” compared to a more liberal approach:

In contrast to the liberal character of the terms used by multiculturalists, such as equality, culture, competence, prejudice, customs, ignorance, fairness, and opportunity, anti-racist practitioners and academics have tended to draw upon more hard-edged politicised terms concerned with struggle, structure, power, exploitation and resistance. … (p. 6)

In their review of CRT and social work education, Abrams and Moio (2009) documented how cultural competency frameworks in the United States—from the liberal ethnic-sensitivity approach of the 1970s to the more radical (post)modern inclusion canon of today—have both muted the full-throated denunciation of racism necessary to critically analyze the normative position of Whiteness in society and the role of race in the creation, maintenance, and justification of oppression. “Since the mid-1980s the tone and character of ‘ethnic-sensitive practice’ has expanded beyond race and ethnicity to promote awareness of multiple forms of oppression such as sexism, heterosexism, ageism, and ableism” (p. 247). However, while a wide-angle social justice lens is critical for social work, Schiele (2007) warned against an “equality of oppressions” approach that can dilute racial oppression, and instead, calls for a more explicit focus on racism.

Although there is widespread agreement that social work education is a critical site for socializing students into the values, knowledge, and skills of the profession, there is little consensus among our professional organizations about how social work programs should promote racial justice within and through both implicit and explicit curricula (Ortiz & Jani, 2010). Among the transformative applications of antiracist perspectives in social work education, Singh (2019) included “empowering students to identify and name racism” (p. 6), increasing awareness of racial inequality, transforming unequal social relations and intercultural encounters, and deconstructing the hegemony of Whiteness. At this historical moment, perhaps we can come to consensus about the urgency of these priorities. But how to do this systematically, throughout curricula?

Background: Antiracism curriculum models

Given the very recent explosion of articles, statements, and calls to advance racial equity and dismantle White supremacy, we want to locate our literature search in time and space. To identify relevant literature on social work curriculum models and approaches that emphasize antiracism and racial equity, we conducted a literature search in April 2020, limiting our results to peer-reviewed journal articles. After reviewing 76 abstracts, we found 12 articles that met these criteria. Importantly, because our focus is on curriculum change processes and models, we did not include in our review a growing and significant body of work on inclusive or antiracist pedagogy within social work education.

Perhaps the best known antiracism curriculum model in the social work education literature of the past 25 years is the effort undertaken at Smith College in the 1990s. In 1994, the Smith College School for Social Work, at the urging of activist students, committed to becoming an antiracist institution (Basham et al., 1997). Smith faculty and students convened an Anti-Racism Task Force to guide antiracist efforts. The task force generated a position paper that contained goals to broadly evaluate and change curricula as needed, but its primary initial focus was a required course on Race and Racism in the U.S. Initial discussions about the racism class revolved around: (a) increasing the proportion of writings from scholars of color, (b) making the course more relevant to students of color, (c) using caucus/affinity groups to promote shared identity and to create autonomous spaces for students of color, and (d) modeling successful interracial communication by having an instructor of color and a White instructor team teach all sections of the course. Toward the end of the 3-year period examined by Basham et al. (1997), momentum grew for embedding antiracist teachings within all courses instead of focusing narrowly on the two racism courses, a necessity now echoed elsewhere in the literature (Fredericks, 2006; Mehrotra et al., 2017; Tecle et al., 2019).

Another successful example of full-scale curricular overhaul aimed at promoting racial equity is the Master of Social Work (MSW) program at California State University, Dominguez Hills that, since 2006, has woven CRT throughout its entire curriculum (Nakaoka et al., 2019). About this approach, Ortiz and Jani (2010) wrote:

We believe that teaching about diversity in higher education involves more than merely presenting a mosaic of different peoples on the faculty and in the student body. In addition, it cannot be taught as the sole enterprise of the curriculum in isolation from the overall ethos of its host institution, or as a single add-on course. … The teaching of diversity content in social work … is more effective when institutional arrangements and the social location of researchers, teachers, learners, and clients are considered. In other words, attention to diversity needs to be integrated throughout both the implicit and explicit curriculums. (p. 176)

Underscoring the importance of this wholesale approach to antiracism curricular change, O’Neill and Miller (2015) noted that “an antiracism commitment necessitates infusion of all courses with an antiracism perspective” (p. 165). Indeed, across curriculum-focused change efforts, a clear theme is the importance of infusing antiracism and racial equity throughout implicit and explicit curricula (Ortiz & Jani, 2010). At Smith, for example, the implicit curriculum comprised structural mechanisms such as recruitment and admissions, retention policies, support systems for faculty of color (Kang & Garran, 2018), antiracism faculty training and workshops (Miller & Garran, 2017), the creation of an Anti-Racism Task Force, and the Anti-Racism Field Assignment, which we briefly discuss next.

In the past 20 years, field study is increasingly recognized as a critical site for racial justice work, both to catalyze transformative change within social work agencies and to provide students with real-world experiences applying antiracism theory. A well-known example of a change effort is the Anti-Racism Field Assignment launched by Smith College in 1995 (Basham et al., 2001), in which first-year MSW students conducted an equity needs assessment, while second-year students implemented a small-scale project. More recently, a growing literature has identified incongruities between social justice–focused education in the classroom and student experiences in the field (Gooding & Mehrotra, 2021). For example, in their study of Canadian MSW graduates (n = 35), Bhuyan et al. (2017) found, “Despite an explicit endorsement of social justice values by the program and the profession, graduates reported limited opportunities to learn anti-oppressive practice or apply social justice theories in their field education” (p. 373).

Before turning to the institutional context of our own curricular change efforts, it is worth emphasizing this key theme in the literature: Effective curricular change aligns all aspects of a curriculum with the racial equity or antiracist mission of the program, department, or school. For maximum effect, this task cannot be approached in a superficial or facile way; it likely requires a critical or deconstructionist approach to assess stated or “manifest” change in both implicit and explicit curricula. For example, writing about the Canadian social work context, Bhuyan et al. (2017) discussed the need to expose the “hidden curriculum” (Margolis & Romero, 1998) that operates to promote a largely rhetorical institutional message of social justice while reinscribing the very “racial and other societal hierarchies” (p. 375) the institution denounces. This might include repeatedly assigning course materials and perspectives that tacitly frame Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) people and communities in one-dimensional or pathologizing ways, continuing to prioritize the instructional needs of White students over those of BIPOC students, or treating the concerns and demands of BIPOC students and faculty with disdain, hostility, or indifference.

Olson (2007) named the tension between social work’s competing projects—the social justice project, which “seeks to transform the conditions that permit the existence of preventable human suffering” and the professional project, which “positions social work as a profession in a system of professions in competition with one another for jurisdictional turf” (p. 45). Building on Olson’s argument, Tecle et al. (2019) noted that the

… lofty and morally-appealing mission of the social justice project is used at times to fulfill the requirements of the professional project, which is why we often see the window dressings of social justice, but are hard-pressed to see how the goals of the social justice project are being fulfilled. (p. 128)

In their latent content analysis of diversity course syllabi from 27 U.S.-based social work programs, Mehrotra et al. (2019) found three implicit assumptions of courses ostensibly intended to develop student competence to engage in antiracist action. These three assumptions are: (a) social workers are members of dominant social groups, (b) cultural competency and antioppression are compatible frameworks, and (c) self-awareness mitigates oppression. The authors concluded, “These assumptions conflict with the purpose and potential of this class to be a space for engagement about structural oppression” and instead “primarily serve the professional project and maintain dynamics of white supremacy and recenter dominance” (p. 139).

In the next section of this article, we describe our efforts to shift some of the ways our BSW program is beholden to the professional project rather than to the social justice project.

Institutional context for our work

Located in the urban core of a mid-size Pacific Northwest city, our university mostly attracts students from in-state (78%). In 2020, enrollment was 26,012 students, 20,969 of whom were undergraduates. At 52% of the student body, White students comprise the majority. Latinx students are the next largest group of students (14%), followed by Asian students (8%), students identifying as bi-and multiracial (6%), Black students (3%), Native American students (1%), and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students (.05%). More than two-thirds (37%) are first-generation college students; 45% of students are Pell Grant eligible.

Within this university context, over 5 years, our BSW enrollment averaged 41% BIPOC students (predominantly Latinx students), 82% transfer students, and 66% first-generation students. The needs and voices of our students, many of whom are actively involved in radical abolitionist, antiracist, queer/trans, and disability social movements, helped catalyze curriculum change. These curricular change efforts also took place as our school prioritized racial equity, and this institutional context helped to sustain our work in the BSW program. For example, in 2016, faculty, staff, students, and alumni conducted a schoolwide racial equity assessment that assessed: (1) organizational commitment and leadership, (2) equity-related policies, (3) organizational culture and climate, (4) student/service user voice, (5) faculty/staff composition, (6) community collaborations, and (7) resource allocation. The following academic year, the School of Social Work (SSW) Students of Color Collective (SOCC) issued a set of expectations for the SSW that specifically named the harm students in the SSW experienced in the field, the school, and the classroom. SOCC expectations and demands mapped closely onto the findings of the racial equity assessment, and both prioritized curriculum, pedagogy, and classroom climate. These assessments, combined with BSW program leadership and faculty support, led us, in 2016, to make a clear and intentional commitment to reviewing and revising our curriculum. Before sharing steps in our process, we briefly review the theoretical frameworks that informed our particular program’s curriculum efforts.

Theoretical frameworks

At the start of this effort, some theoretical frameworks, like intersectional feminism and CRT, were already infused into parts of our BSW curriculum. As we moved into curriculum review and revision, we sought guidance and drew inspiration from these theories and from a broad, diverse, and multidisciplinary set of ideas. Table 1 lists five theoretical frameworks that we drew on—from the fields of education, policy implementation, CRT, popular education, and leadership and management. Notably, some theories, like management and policy implementation, are not typically associated with antiracist efforts. However, we found these theories useful because they anticipate organizational resistance and offer concrete strategies for centering stakeholders in the process of organizational change. Below, we describe key ideas; in a subsequent section of the article, we discuss how we put these ideas into practice.

Table 1. Theoretical frameworks for racial equity curriculum change.

Area	Education	Popular Education	Critical Race Theory/ Intersectional Feminism	Policy Implementation	Leadership and Management
Cites	Gay, 2000; CantuRuiz and Cantu, 2013	P. Freire, 1968	Crenshaw, 1989; Crenshaw et al., 1995	Sandfort and Moulton, 2014	Heifetz et al., 2009
Ideas	Enduring understandings	Dialogics versus colonizing pedagogy	Demarginalizing intersections; centering BIPOC voices	Target experiences analysis	Technical versus adaptive challenges
Use/ application	Knowledge you wish students to retrieve years after taking the course	Cooperation, unity, organization, and cultural synthesis are decolonizing strategies	“The goal … should be to facilitate the inclusion of marginalized groups for whom it can be said: ‘When they enter, we all enter’” (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 167)	Choose three to four composite students to keep in mind while redesigning curriculum	Technical problems are discrete and solvable; adaptive challenges require organizational culture change

Note. BIPOC = Black, Indigenous, people of color.

Education theory

Enduring understandings. Simply put, an enduring understanding is the learning that stays with you at the end of a course or an education. Education theorists McTighe et al. (2004) asserted that learning is more likely to persist when: it is centered on big ideas, students are invited to solve problems using high-level thinking, it occurs in real-world and authentic contexts, instruction is engaging and thought-provoking, the learning is scaffolded, and the feedback iterative and constructive. This project-based, backward mapping approach to learning can be thought of as teaching for meaning and understanding. Within this framework, several questions guide the development of enduring understandings:

What are the big ideas and core processes that students should come to understand? What will teachers look for as evidence that students truly understand the big ideas and can apply their knowledge and skills in meaningful and effective ways? What teaching strategies will help students make meaning of curriculum content while avoiding the problems of aimless coverage and activity-oriented instruction? (p. 27)

Popular education: Dialogics versus colonizing pedagogy

The traditional model of education, described by Freire (1970/2006), is a “banking model.” In this model, students are receptacles into which educators deposit knowledge; the student role is to listen, memorize, and repeat what they learn. The lack of critical thinking in this model reinforces systems of oppression. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire (1968) describes this model of education as “well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well humans fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it” (p. 57). Colonizing pedagogy does not teach the oppressed to see the structure of their oppression. In this way, traditional education helps to maintain domination and hegemony. By contrast, dialogic pedagogy is structured around critical interrogation of topics, facilitated through respectful dialogue between students and instructors. Student and instructor participation in learning is regarded as fundamentally equitable (Freire, 1968).

Critical race theory

Centering voices of those historically marginalized. From its origins in critical legal studies (cf., Bell, 1980), CRT has emerged within social work education as a key theory of pedagogical liberation (Abrams & Moio, 2009; Constance-Huggins, 2012; Ortiz & Jani, 2010; Razack & Jeffery, 2002). Six tenets are central to CRT. First, racism is an everyday occurrence for people of color. Second, race is a social construct. Third, differential racialization holds that racism should be viewed through a historical and contextual lens, as racialized groups shift based on the given contemporary standpoint. Fourth is the principle of interest convergence, which maintains that those with power will only give up their power if their interests are being served. The fifth tenet of CRT is that dominant groups, to justify and legitimize their power, exclude from historical accounts the voices and narratives of people of color. Conversely, CRT seeks to center the voices of the oppressed. And finally, CRT requires an intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1989) so that patterns of oppression are not replicated by holding racism as superordinate to other forms of oppression (Abrams & Moio, 2009; Constance-Huggins, 2012; Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 2017; Nakaoka & Ortiz, 2018).

Policy implementation theory

Target experiences analysis. In their text on public policy implementation, Sandfort and Moulton (2014) describe a process that can be used in a wide range of implementation scenarios to evaluate program and policy effectiveness. This process, the target experiences analysis, helps implementers of public programs or policies to shift from an operations- or systems-focused perspective to a service or program user-centered perspective. Steps in the process include: (a) gathering information from the target audience about their experience of the services, or in this case, educational programming, delivered; (b) creating personae to represent characteristic experiences of the program that differ by social location and identity; and (c) abductively applying these representative profiles and imagining how these personae experience the policy or program. Possible questions used in the last part of the process include, “What does this snapshot reveal about target group members that is obscured in current conceptions of implementation? Where might our attention for making changes to improve implementation be focused?” (Sandfort & Moulton, 2014, p. 277).

Leadership and management theory

Technical versus adaptive challenges. Leadership scholars Heifetz et al. (2009) distinguished between two kinds of challenges that leaders face: technical versus adaptive. Technical problems are typically easy to identify and relatively easy to fix. They rely on rote procedure and can be solved with expert authority or knowledge. They are typically contained within organizational boundaries, popular, and quick to implement. Conversely, adaptive challenges are not only difficult to identify but are easy to deny. They are structural and cultural in nature; they remain deeply embedded in the organizational culture of an agency or country. Changing them requires shifting values, beliefs, roles, relationships, and sometimes organizational structures. They are rarely contained and permeate all aspects of an organization. What’s more: They are time-consuming, offer no quick fix, and must be solved by the people they most affect. Solutions require multiple experiments and iterations, like Plan, Do, Study, Act cycles. Tackling racism is perhaps one of the best examples of an adaptive challenge any of us will ever encounter.

This section of the article has briefly described five key ideas—enduring understandings, dialogic pedagogy, centering the voices of the historically marginalized, target experiences analysis, and adaptive versus technical challenges—that guided our efforts to align our curriculum with the goals of racial equity. In the following section, we talk, concretely, about how we approached the task of curriculum review and change.

Practice of our model

Informed by the theoretical frameworks outlined above, we have reviewed and revised our curriculum in several critical ways since 2016. In the section that follows, we share practices we employed: (a) crafting a curriculum statement to guide curricular review; (b) conducting a target experiences analysis (Sandfort & Moulton, 2014); (c) generating sequence-specific enduring understandings (Wiggins & McTighe, 2011); (d) managing technical issues and adaptive challenges (Heifetz et al., 2009); and (e) evaluating student experience. In our case, these activities happened relatively sequentially; however, the process was not exclusively linear, and activities were not always discrete.

Writing a curriculum statement

In talking with our colleagues in 2016, we learned that Seattle University was in a process of revision and renewal they described as decolonizing their social work curriculum. This concept was familiar to us from Canadian programs, but we were especially intrigued by the curriculum commitment Seattle University made. In this statement, their program pledged that 50% of learning materials would reflect “non-dominant perspectives, knowledge and authorship of people of color, and knowledge and authorship of other marginalized populations” (Seattle University, Department of Social Work, 2020, p. 4).

Inspired by this approach, the two undergraduate programs in our school worked together to craft a similar curriculum statement. In fall 2016, we adopted this commitment:

In recognition of the many voices which are and have been excluded in curricula, members of the PSU [Portland State University] Children Youth, and Families and Bachelors of Social Work programs have committed to an ongoing critical review of our texts and materials with a focus on decolonizing, decentering, and challenging dominant perspectives. We are committed to centering in our curriculum the voices of people who experience racism, classism, sexism, heterocentrism, ableism, nativism, islamophobia, xenophobia, and all other forms of oppression. With a particular focus on addressing racial inequities, we commit to include in all our offered courses a preponderance of materials and texts from non-dominant perspectives. (Portland State University School of Social Work, 2022)

The statement, which is inclusive but specifically focused on racial inequity, has become an anchor for reviewing and revising course syllabi and content. The language signals our aspirations and values, and it holds us accountable in tangible and measurable ways. Including the statement in all syllabi allows students to verify whether faculty have delivered on this commitment.

To keep the process of curricular renewal alive, we have devoted regularly recurring space in faculty meetings and retreats to present revised syllabi, to share author and text suggestions, to share new assignments, and to get feedback. For some courses, this commitment has meant replacing dominant discourse textbooks (e.g., Human Behavior in the Social Environment texts) with readings that center trans/queer/BIPOC development and family life. In other courses, it has meant assigning antagonist readings. In Intro to Social Work, for example, we continue to use a text that extols Jane Addams and Progressive Era reformers, but we now pair it with abolitionist readings (cf., Davis, 2003; Roberts, 2021) and chapters from An Indigenous People’s History of the U.S. (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014). We encourage students to discuss the contradictions inherent in these histories. In research courses, we have changed the way we select readings that highlight particular methodologies, giving equal consideration to study design and representation. For example, some articles deriving from large public health or general social science datasets can frame people and communities solely in terms of risk and pathology. We now try to select articles exemplary both for method and for advancing social justice goals.

In many courses, the curriculum commitment has prompted significant rethinking of assignments, texts, and even grading toward more community-based assignments and greater ownership of student learning. For example, in an especially popular assignment, students interview two members of the community about their definition of social justice and then compare and contrast definitions using political theory they are learning. Regarding grading, several instructors now invite students to write a start-of-term essay in which they set their own learning goals. At the end of term, in conversation with the professor, they evaluate progress on their desired goals and grade themselves. Finally, at the level of pedagogy, instructors report bringing more of their authentic selves into their teaching, which has been well-received by students.

Conducting a target experiences analysis

After crafting our curriculum statement, we realized that we would need time and space to think together about our program. Between 2016 and 2020, we held four faculty retreats—typically day-long sessions with breaks to eat together and build community. During one retreat in fall 2017, guided by the idea of a target experiences analysis, we conducted an exercise in which we asked two questions: “For which students is our program working? For which students is it not working?” Our collective answer to the first question fit on one sheet of flip-pad paper. It was an unimpressive list of the types of students for whom the program worked: students with a functional view of social work, mature students with practical life skills, students acculturated to higher education, students with some understanding of oppression and privilege, students with natural supports. In short, we concluded that our program worked for students who would make any program work.

Answers to the second question quickly spilled onto two large poster sheets and included a wide swath of students from multiple social locations and needs: students who were expecting the program to be typically cognitive-centric rather than practice and reflexivity-centric; students with histories of incarceration who encounter obstacles in field placement; students who are working full time and providing caregiving to children or adults; students with food, housing, or financial insecurity; students with less exposure to social justice frameworks; students with expectations of Ivy League “rigor”; and BIPOC students—with acknowledgment of the range of experiences among Latinx, Black, and Indigenous students in our program.

This was a sobering but pivotal exercise. It mobilized the care we all felt for our students and challenged us, collectively, to teach to those students who disproportionately struggled to succeed in our program. At the end of the day, we reached agreement and investment in overhauling the curriculum. To speak to the needs of BIPOC students and communities, to elevate the voices of critical and marginalized scholars, and to reject the implicit recentering of Whiteness baked into most social work curricula, we chose to prioritize equity and inclusion across our implicit and explicit curricula.

Crafting enduring understandings

Our next step in this process took 2 years to complete, was far from linear, and is not final, even as we write this. The most helpful exercise we conducted together was a two-part process in which we spent half the day identifying gaps in our curriculum, such as high-effect practices (Kuh, 2008), writing-intensive courses, American Psychological Association content, and content that centered our student body and community. For the second half of the day, we mapped the entire curriculum on a large whiteboard and used a process called brainwriting, in which everyone takes part by writing their own ideas on sticky notes. We invited everyone to write enduring understandings for all courses but prioritized perspectives of faculty who routinely taught a particular course. We posted all notes under each course and then walked through the curriculum together, collapsing individual definitions into larger enduring understandings for each course. For example, an enduring understanding for our advanced research course is:

Research is inherently political. To conduct research with integrity means we need to become critical consumers of it, to identify how epistemology drives the research process, to disrupt problematic power dynamics in our own research, and ultimately, to ask meaningful questions that advance social justice.

This process was very similar to qualitative coding; essentially, we backward mapped the entire curriculum to identify gaps and to forge consensus-based priorities. Individual faculty then took these understandings into their next rounds of course design. Regarding course design, we took advantage of “interest convergence” to promote our racial equity commitment. In the past 5 years, we built an entire online program with funding from our university’s Office of Academic Innovation. This allowed us to pay faculty for course redesign that we could then use as the basis for our entire curriculum.

Managing technical problems versus adaptive challenges

Leadership in racial equity curriculum change is an underexplored area of the social work education literature. For this reason, and because our BSW program director has used implementation science in large-scale intervention studies, we have returned again and again to the idea of technical versus adaptive challenges, which comes from business and management literature. As previously discussed, technical problems are discrete and easily solved deploying standardized knowledge (e.g., changing a tire). Conversely, adaptive challenges involve the slow and sometimes frustrating work of reconciling values discrepancies. Unlike technical problems, which can be resolved quickly, adaptive challenges require time, diagnostic skills, strategy, consultation, and competence in carrying out the solution (e.g., fixing a blown head gasket). The upshot of this approach is that we try to resist the seduction of “technical” fixes when it comes to antiracist curricular change.

Examples of technical fixes in this realm could be: holding a one-off training versus implementing ongoing coaching; hiring consultants instead of doing the work ourselves; mandating that faculty teach certain content versus collectively sharing expertise and motivating improvement intrinsically; buying ready-made content from vendors; tokenizing BIPOC faculty rather than prioritizing recruitment, retention, and quality of life; or asking racialized and minoritized faculty to do the work without compensation, recognition, consent, or a larger structure of support and accountability. To change the culture of an organization, adaptive challenges are ideally recognized by leadership and prioritized—with time, structural support, and persistent strategic administrative effort.

Evaluating curriculum efforts

Finally, to ensure that curriculum change is producing desired outcomes, we have found it helpful to survey faculty and staff to better understand: (a) what support faculty need in this ongoing effort, and (b) how the curriculum is landing, especially among BIPOC students. We have collected formative evaluation data with which to make program improvements. To date, formative data are somewhat unsurprising: Faculty report that their courses are mostly aligned with our racial equity commitment but that they lack time to overhaul courses fully. They consistently wish for more professional development and training opportunities on antiracist teaching, skill development, and curricular expertise.

Regarding students, in general, White students are more likely than BIPOC students to report that the curriculum reflects the priority on racial equity. However, in Director Dialogs, which the BSW program director hosts each year with all seniors, a more nuanced picture emerges: BIPOC students who connect with at least one BIPOC faculty member or with other students to provide community care feel more positively about the program and the curriculum. This is true of faculty as well. Faculty who regularly take part in affinity groups (e.g., BIPOC faculty/staff support group, Anti-Racism Group for White faculty/staff) seem to benefit from opportunities to connect authentically and reflexively around the topics of racism, healing, and ongoing equity work.

In holding ourselves accountable to this work, we are designing a summative evaluation that will measure the extent to which racial equity is prioritized in our implicit curriculum (e.g., admissions decisions, faculty and staff hiring and recruitment, student and faculty retention, advising, faculty support) and explicit curricula. With regard to explicit curricula, we are carefully considering our distal outcomes. Ultimately, we will likely measure some combination of empirical postcurricular change in student ability to carry out effective antiracist action and postcurricular change in BIPOC student self-report of empowerment/relevance of the curriculum to BIPOC communities.

Facilitators

Several factors have supported our curricular change efforts, including: (a) larger momentum from all stakeholders within our school to address racial justice and equity issues; (b) leadership championing racial equity as a priority across the SSW; (c) hiring a BSW program director trained in critical theory, with a commitment to racial justice; (d) prioritizing the hiring and retention of faculty of color—specifically, faculty with the skills and vision to develop and implement curricula in line with our racial justice goals; (e) having a small team of 10 full-time faculty that was motivated to do the work, both individually and collectively; and (f) cultivating a shared understanding that the process requires patience, collaboration, time, many meetings, and willingness to have difficult conversations.

Challenges

Despite the facilitators discussed above, we also continue to experience ongoing tensions and challenges. These include, at the instructor level:

1. Uneven buy-in and resistance. This seems to crystallize around teaching the social work canon versus teaching counternarratives, integrating alternative paradigms, and bringing interdisciplinary perspectives into courses. Some faculty members fear that without canonical knowledge, our students will be underprepared for the field. Relatedly, faculty have differing levels of experience and readiness for teaching new content and implementing more inclusive pedagogy.

2. Lack of curricular materials (or perceived lack of materials) for certain courses. Instructors in domains such as research have expressed the concern that it is difficult to find textbooks or other materials written by BIPOC and other minoritized scholars.

3. Academic freedom. A vexing challenge is how to support a standardized curriculum—especially if we want to address the real harms that take place in the classroom—while upholding principles of academic freedom in which faculty are able to do and teach what they want in their own classes.

4. Program goals. A recurring conversation is whether we’re focused on preparing field-ready BSW practitioners or preparing students who will enter MSW Advanced Standing programs. Can we do both well, and whom do we serve with these disparate goals?

5. Institutional challenges. These include budget constraints, high teaching loads, pressure to increase enrollment, the additional labor required to facilitate student success in an access institution, changing racial equity priorities, and few resources around pedagogy and curriculum revision.

While these challenges are not insurmountable, they can sap momentum. During the pandemic, we have also missed opportunities to come together in person, which has generally helped us to recenter our shared commitment to racial equity.

Additional lessons learned

Over the past 5 years, we have used a relational, values-driven, collaborative process to infuse racial equity in more meaningful and consistent ways into our curriculum. It has helped to operate from the understanding that racial equity work is multidimensional and complex and that programmatic change takes time. This has required consistent teamwork, communication, and willingness to make space for needed discussions. In keeping with the implementation science idea that to change an organization, you must have the right people working in it, we have, since 2016, hired four new faculty. In our hiring processes, we prioritized racial equity and the recruitment and retention of BIPOC faculty. This has made an enormous difference in our program and school. Having a team of BIPOC faculty with a shared commitment to meeting the needs of our diverse students and a desire to approach the curriculum with a racial justice lens has been instrumental in our progress. In addition, for some courses, we were able to leverage university resources to support course redesign. Because we have several junior faculty very involved with curricular change work, we have also aimed to support them to integrate racial equity and curriculum development into their scholarly agendas and promotion and tenure portfolios.

Discussion

This article describes our efforts, over the past 5 years, to align our BSW curriculum with a commitment to racial equity, which we define as an aspirational condition achieved when racialized injustice, in all its discursive and material manifestations, is eradicated. We regard the outcome of racial equity work as a state in which “people, including people of color, are owners, planners, and decision makers in the systems that govern their lives” (Race Forward, n.d.). For the social work profession, which is deeply implicated in the creation and maintenance of the systems that govern our lives, this is a profound goal.

Whether we like it or not, we, as social work educators, share responsibility for reproducing the social work labor force, and thus, perpetuating or interrupting racism. We know that across time and nation-state, our profession has overtly and covertly reinscribed White supremacy (Blackstock et al., 2004; Dominelli, 2018; Kivel, 2020; Maylea, 2020; Park, 2019; Sinclair, 2007). In the wake of two devastating years, as we take stock of our profession’s 122-year history and consider its future, historical knowledge can guide us. If we should learn anything from our history, it is perhaps that the great bulk of social work’s connivance with systemic racism has been banal and bureaucratic. It has derived from the inherent contradictions of a profession concurrently aimed at empowerment and liberation but also surveillance and adjudication, at service and compassion, but also neoliberal indifference and punitive neglect (Bryson, 2016, 2019; Maylea, 2020; Mehrotra et al., 2016; Schram et al., 2008; Soss et al., 2011; Wacquant, 2009; Woodward, 2021).

Given social work’s long-stated commitment to social justice (Healy, 2008; Pearson et al., 1993; Reisch, 2011) but ambivalent embrace of antiracism, per se (Abrams & Moio, 2009; Dominelli, 2018; Schiele, 2007; Tecle et al., 2019), we were not entirely surprised to find few pragmatic models of racial equity–focused curricular change in the social work literature. In our minds, this does not indicate the absence of racial equity work in social work departments across the country; rather, we suspect that this work is simply not being documented in the larger literature. We know that BIPOC faculty, especially at predominantly White institutions, are regularly doing the emotional, cognitive, and pedagogical labor of consulting, revising, and redesigning social work curricula—implicitly and explicitly. As mentioned, our professional organizations have just begun to incentivize and legitimize this work, which is significant. We hope this will lead to more publications in this area.

Conclusion and next steps

As we move toward racial equity in our programs, schools, and professional organizations, we would do well to embrace Race Forward’s (2021) actionable and pragmatic Principles for Racially Equitable Policy Platforms. These are: (a) fix systems, not people; (b) create racially equitable solutions that benefit all; (c) ensure that solutions are grounded in and emerge from the experience of communities of color; (d) collect stakeholder data and use it to track and target greatest need; and (e) set measurable, results-based equity goals with specific attention to racial effects.

With regard to our next steps, we are inspired by our colleagues who have infused their curriculum with CRT (Nakaoka et al., 2019). CRT feels especially important to support in this moment in which the conservative right is trying to write colonization and slavery out of U.S. history. We are also encouraged by BIPOC faculty in our program who have experienced being known and nurtured by faculty in historically Black colleges and universities or other autonomous spaces. Accordingly, we have begun to talk about the effect of centering healing and liberation in our program and in social work education. As we gather data from BIPOC field instructors and students, we are also having deeper discussions about the relationship between field education and racial equity. Finally, we are invested in holding ourselves accountable by evaluating our efforts. Next steps in evaluation will focus on racial effect and may include establishing benchmarks and guidelines for course redesign, measuring tangible change in pedagogy following antiracist faculty development opportunities, and assessing student competency in advocating for racial equity.

Racial equity-centered curricula are needed to equip social workers as critical thinkers and change agents within communities and organizations. Given the urgency of the present historical moment, and the recent endorsement of our professional organizations, we hope other social work educators will share their strategies for curriculum revision in the service of racial justice goals, no matter how partial or incomplete. While our program process has been imperfect and iterative, it has moved us toward a program that is more responsive to BIPOC students, that is more representative of nondominant scholars and researchers, and, ultimately, that is preparing students to more meaningfully address systemic racism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephanie A. Bryson

Stephanie A. Bryson is Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Portland State University. Gita Mehrotra is Associate Professor at Portland State University. Jessica Rodriguez-JenKins is Assistant Professor at Portland State University. Passion Ilea is Doctoral Student at Portland State University.