Identifying songs of social justice and protest for social work education

Abstract

ABSTRACT Educators of social justice continually seek new tools to encourage learning. Music recordings and their lyrics provide an innovative means for learning about the emergence of social concerns and encourage social action. Using a complex systems perspective to facilitate a bottoms-up approach, we applied an exploratory study by using commercial off-the-shelf music player software to identify relevant songs that encourage the learning of human conditions, the related social environment and justice in American society. Complexity theory framed the study by using the socio-political environments of social change as a complex adaptive system to address the research question; Can using songs of protest facilitate the learning of students in social action curricula? We probed three periods of significant social action in the United States; Songs tended to focus on labor and work conditions during the Progressive Era, unemployment and available services during the New Deal, and civil rights during the Great Society. Lists of appropriate songs are provided for each period with their lyrics located. Using this media to integrate songs of protest or other socially relevant music can be applied to social work policy coursework. We demonstrate that social work educators benefit by acquiring additional computing skills to identify a variety of media in their classrooms.