We Are What We Read

Emily Tillotson,Cheris Brewer Current,Susan Smith

doi:10.18060/24064

Abstract

A school of social work devised a process to assess the implicit curriculum by auditing the required readings to identify the race and gender of the authors. As a profession, we espouse a strong commitment to social justice and diversity. Yet we know that there are limitations to our objectivity and that auditing is a valuable tool that can reveal biases. The concrete data provided by an audit can help reveal and disrupt entrenched patterns. The audit was conducted by reviewing the syllabi for required BSW and MSW courses. For each text, we collected the names, gender, and race for each author. Across all programs, authors were disproportionately White as compared to the general U.S. population, professional authors, professional social workers, and students in the programs. Similarly, men were over-represented as compared to all of the benchmarks, except for the authors in the BSW program, which was more feminized as compared to the U.S. population. This assessment process adds to the existing toolset by measuring current levels of representation—including over and underrepresentation. It is hoped that auditing will prove an effective tool for doing antiracist and anti-oppressive assessment, however an audit can only reveal where work is needed.

Highlights

A school of social work devised a process to assess the implicit curriculum by auditing the required readings to identify the race and gender of the authors
The authors are cognizant of the legacy of inequality and, in particular, White supremacy and patriarchy that are endemic to American culture
Evaluations of institutionalized, structured power are necessary before justice can be sought out. We believe that this auditing assessment is a substantial aid in understanding patterns of white supremacy and patriarchy as it quantifies the sum of our choices and moves them from implicit to the realm of explicit—where they can fundamentally be addressed

Summary

Introduction

A school of social work devised a process to assess the implicit curriculum by auditing the required readings to identify the race and gender of the authors. Men were over-represented as compared to all of the benchmarks, except for the authors in the BSW program, which was more feminized as compared to the U.S population This assessment process adds to the existing toolset by measuring current levels of representation—including over and underrepresentation. Higher education offers a lot of symbolic talk about commitment to diversity, but the literature suggests there is a gap between rhetoric and practice (BonillaSilva & Baiocchi, 2001; Harper, 2012; Shapiro et al, 2017) This gap creates a tension between social work values and actions, and may fail to produce professionals that are prepared to work in a diverse society or challenge inequalities (Mehrotra et al, 2017). We hypothesize that despite a commitment to social justice, social work educators will disproportionately select textbooks written by authors with dominant racial and gender identities

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Conclusion