Abstract for presentation at Global Social Work 2004

Since social work is purportedly a profession which is challenging inequalities and social exclusion (International Definition of Social Work 2001; Global Qualifying Standards for Social Work Education and Training 2002 http://www.iassw.soton.ac.uk; Sullivan and Johns 2002), it is, in my view, pertinent to examine the issues of privilege, inequality and subjugation in relation to the social work curriculum. In this paper I have attempted to do so firstly, by elaborating on how traditional texts and curricula on Child and Family Care failed to resonate with students at UWC, an historically disadvantaged institution, who have been marginalized by being marked in various ways in the South African context. I examine the assumptions underlying a typical traditional text in the field of Child and Family Care, which is exemplary of those which are utilised at tertiary institutions in South Africa. I then describe how students were given the opportunity of reflecting critically about what had happened to themselves and their family members in relation to racisms, gender and generational issues in an assignment they had to complete on their own family practices. By engaging in this exercise, UWC students who have been otherised in a multitude of ways, could contemplate how their family practices were affected by either by deprivation or access to privileges. One of the major purposes of this paper is to give legitimacy and currency to students’ own knowledges of their own families through the lenses of race, gender and age in order to subvert official or expert dominant discourses. I explain how new understandings of the politics of knowledge creation (process) and of family practices (content) are developed as being relevant for the social work curriculum. This is achieved by giving students the discursive space to interrogate dominant discourses by contemplating their own family practices in the light of South African socio-cultural conditions.