A Paradigmatic Shift in Anti-racist Social Work Practice: An Example from Australian Tertiary Education

Racism makes itself present through cultural, social, political, economic, and health systems. In places like Australia, these systems are codified by policies, laws, and worldviews of White settler society. In this chapter, we detail a distinct tertiary educational effort that engaged in the unveiling of White superiority and decolonizing of curricula and teaching and learning practices, and thus attempted to challenge the normalization of contemporary racism. We share how the social work program, at the University of Tasmania, has redesigned its entire program around a decolonizing pedagogy and recently engaged with how social workers learn about social innovation and sustainability in the face of challenges such as climate change, racism, ongoing colonization, pervasive inequality, and now COVID-19. We share the teaching and learning framework, how it promoted the examination of Western superiority and Whiteness in social work, how it supported social work students to value the merits of decolonization and indigenization, and how it sought to link all this within the context of innovative, sustainable, and regenerative social work practice.

This chapter also examines how efforts like these are inevitable, where White supremacy and White fragility make themselves known, but also where they can be challenged and replaced with what we call a paradigmatic shift in anti-racist practice. A shift characterized by a focus on unsettling Western superiority, supported by deep important questioning, relationality with self, others, kin, community, and country, and an invitation to ethically embrace comfort with constant discomfort.