bell hooks describes to us in Teaching to Transgress that our education should be liberatory through self-actualization in the classroom by teachers and students. By challenging what Paulo Freire calls the “banking system of education,” where we simply take in whatever our teachers present to us, we can begin to marry theory and practice with self-actualization.
However, self-actualization cannot occur without vulnerability and space for student expression. How many of us are annoyed when professors do not give us clear guidelines or give us too many choices in how to complete a project? We do, because we have ingrained a patriarchal and hierarchical concept of an education that leaves no room for self-expression and liberatory practice. Are we (teachers and students) willing to take the risks necessary for transformational pedagogy?
Paying the same amount of tuition as pre-COVID-19, we have tremendous power in determining the type of education we have and how well our school embodies social work values. There is the notion that we pay tuition so that the university provides knowledge and services for us. However, our tuition also goes into redeveloping and changing the landscape of the very neighborhoods that our clients live and work in—and that hold history and knowledge no university walls can hold. How will we shape ourselves and our university to make theory a liberatory practice, as bell hooks poignantly states?
For many years, students at the School of Social Work have organized with faculty and staff to incorporate anti-oppression and equity into the curriculum. The progress that we see today is in large part due to their work. In future editions of this journal, we will further discuss the history of student activism on campus, specifically surrounding curriculum. Currently, we are bringing students together alongside faculty to evaluate and further develop the structural oppression 610 course to ensure that it is meeting its goals and expanding our education.
Completing a course evaluation is one of many important strategies that we as students can use to hold the school accountable and ensure that we, along with our classmates, are receiving truly anti-oppressive and anti-racist education. We urge students to think critically about course evaluations at the end of this semester, paying close attention to how accessible, inclusive, and anti-oppressive your courses were. Did your courses include research, theory, and scholarship conducted by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) scholars? How did your course address health, economic, and service disparities based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, age, etc.? Did your classes discuss the influence of racism in social work in the past and today? Those are just a few questions to keep in mind when you complete those evaluations.
When we return from the winter break, the Anti-Oppression Work Group (AOWG), the Alliance of Anti-Racist Social Work Practitioners (the Alliance), the Queer Community Alliance (QCA), and DREAM (a disability justice group) are collaborating to host the first-ever student-led syllabi review event of foundation-level courses. This will give you the tools to analyze the content for the semester, communicate concerns with professors, and be ready to make the most of your classes. We will be thinking through ways to examine our course curriculum and equitably evaluate our education. We will have tools that include many more questions in addition to those mentioned above. And together, we will strategize how we can hold the school accountable to its goal of providing an anti-oppressive education.
If you want to be a part of these conversations, you can join any of the aforementioned student groups:
alliance@ssw.umaryland.edu, IG: @allianceumbssw
aowg@ssw.umaryland.edu, IG:: @aowg_umb_ssw
sswqca@ssw.umaryland.edu
Contact Isabel McLain at imclain@umaryland.edu, a student member of the Diversity Anti-Oppression (DAO) Coalition, for more information on working with faculty and staff on the curriculum.
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