Embodying Social Work as a Profession

Maura B Nsonwu,Noel Busch Armendariz,Sharon Warren Cook,Kathleen Casey

doi:10.1177/2158244013503835

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to highlight competing and contrasting definitions of social work that have been the subject of continuous ideological debate. These opposing interpretations have characterized public and professional discourse. It is the growth of, and struggle over, these conflicting versions of social work that we trace by exploring and expanding on the work of African American and White social work pioneers, feminist and empowerment epistemologies, and implications for social work practice and pedagogy. Our discussion emphasizes the construction of meaning through personal experiences by reuniting the head, hands, heart, and soul of our profession. We offer a reconstructed framework that echoes the groundbreaking work of our historical pioneers and collectively weaves their wisdom into contemporary social work practice.

Highlights

What is social work? How do we describe what social workers do? It seems as though—given the development of our professional identity over more than a century—the answers to these questions should be relatively straightforward
What we know is that there continues to be ideological and theoretical debates taking place in public and intraprofessional venues. The aim of this current dialogue is to trace the growth of, and struggle over, these interpretations through the thinking of prominent social work pioneers, African American and White women, who collectively embodied a holistic view of social work and help us define our professional identity
The justification of this selection is the premise of this article and serves as a foundation to scaffold additional feminist and empowerment theoretical framework. We reconstruct this model for social work practice by modifying these dimensions as head, hands, and heart while incorporating the soul as an important addition. We use this platform to discuss the implications of feminist epistemologies on social work practice and pedagogy with particular emphasis on how social workers construct meaning from their personal experiences

Summary

Introduction

What is social work? How do we describe what social workers do? It seems as though—given the development of our professional identity over more than a century—the answers to these questions should be relatively straightforward. We expand on Rose’s (1983) framework of the hand, brain, and heart to describe a feminist paradigm of working in the scientific field The justification of this selection is the premise of this article and serves as a foundation to scaffold additional feminist and empowerment theoretical framework. We reconstruct this model for social work practice by modifying these dimensions as head, hands, and heart while incorporating the soul as an important addition. We use this platform to discuss the implications of feminist epistemologies on social work practice and pedagogy with particular emphasis on how social workers construct meaning from their personal experiences. Our aim in this article is to expand our thinking on these subjects using a historical framework, its connection to the signature pedagogy for social work education, and feminist and empowerment theoretical paradigms as our starting point

Objectives

Conclusion