Cross-cultural Social Work Practice Research Articles

Teaching students to identify and address significant critical moments in cross-cultural social work practice

ABSTRACT Critical social work practice should transcend across micro, mezzo, and macro levels, and it is a social work educator’s responsibility to foster skills that are contextualized and connected to social justice and anti-oppressive frameworks. Despite the importance of addressing and integrating systemic oppression in cross-cultural social work practice, students struggle with being able to translate their knowing into doing. Using a video case of a client named Glen who is receiving services in an outpatient addiction counseling program, we discuss how to incorporate a critical, systemic, and structural lens in social work mental health practice. Psychotherapy process research cautions against weighing an entire session equally and underlines the importance of examining critical moments within the session. Guided by a psychotherapy process research approach, we illustrate how we train students to identify significant in-session moments and encourage students to brainstorm and practice in-session social work tasks that integrate a structural lens with clinical interventions. This teaching approach also illustrates how to translate critical scholarship and approaches into micro-level teachable moments in classroom to guide students’ cross-cultural practice. The pedagogical approach using a micro-analysis of in-session social work tasks heightens students’ awareness and competence in how to intervene with culturally diverse clients.

Unsettling Discourses of Cross-Cultural Social Work Practice: Moving from Theoretical Debates to Interrogating and Transforming Praxis

Abstract Cultural competence is one of the most debated concepts in social work. Whilst some scholars view it as a central tenet of social work theory, practice and education, others critique it as a new form of racism and even encourage its abandonment in social work. Amidst this fierce debate, this article attempts to answer the following question: How do we become entrapped by our own thinking when it comes to fostering or critiquing cultural competence and related constructs as well as understanding their embodiment in everyday social work practice? Using a post-structural lens, especially Foucault’s work on the ‘Order of Things’ in society, this article interrogates discourses and praxis in cross-cultural social work practice (CCSWP). After briefly examining the pervasive concepts of cultural competence, cultural humility and structural competence currently in circulation, this article elaborates upon debated discourses and interrogates the praxis underlying CCSWP. Instead of descending into semantic and theoretical debates and promoting one dogmatism above others, it is essential to assume a position of ongoing interrogation and critique of the pervasive discourses and praxis of cultural competence and alternative concepts. Doing so can promote reflective CCSWP and create the possibility for transformative change in social work practice.

Praxis of cross-cultural social work practice (CCSWP): A critical discourse analysis of graduate student and faculty perspectives on cultural competence and relevant constructs

To examine how social work students and faculty perceive and embody cultural competence, we conducted five focus groups with graduate students ( N = 16) and faculty members ( N = 10) from Canadian schools of social work. We interrogated how different theoretical frameworks related to cross-cultural social work practice (CCSWP) have been circulated and reified in social work education, and how certain dominant frameworks have been translated to embodied cross-cultural interactions in social work practice. To examine the praxis of CCSWP, which is often subtle and embedded in the semantics of languages and discourses, we were informed by critical theories of power, language, and discourses to analyze the data. The interview transcripts of both student and faculty focus groups showed similar dominant discursive patterns: (1) critiquing the conceptual use of cultural competence, (2) having a preference for terms such as cultural humility, cultural safety, or other constructs, and (3) describing the embodied practice of these constructs mainly as a general practice and omitting cross-cultural work. Participants differed in their expressed opposition to cultural competence and the exact terms they preferred as an alternative. Overall, participants discursively changed from a critical debate on semantic and conceptual differences between these constructs to negating them altogether as meaningless, effacing the very notion of cross-cultural social work and its embodied practice. In the end, cultural competence was discounted as both oppressive and anti-oppressive, a position which is reflected in the contested scholarship on cultural competence.

Developing holistic competence in cross-cultural social work practice: Simulation-based learning optimized by blended teaching approach

ABSTRACT Integrating anti-oppressive practice (AOP) into clinical interactions is critical for embodying social justice values and promoting equitable and socially just interventions in social work practice. Therefore, training social work students to perform this task is invaluable and pedagogically challenging. Social work education scholars note that students’ knowledge and attitudes are not automatically translated into well-demonstrated professional behaviors and thus encourage to develop the holistic competence inclusive of both meta- and procedural competencies in students. Toward this pedagogical goal, this paper elaborates the development of a cross-cultural social work practice course to foster students’ holistic competence. Following the Council of Social Work Education’s Education Policy and Accreditation Standards and AOP scholarship, we outline students’ learning outcomes and the expected competencies in embodying socially just and culturally competent practice (SJCCP). Using blended learning, this course maximizes both online and in-person interfaces to foster social work students’ competencies in SJCCP. We provide details of how we incorporated simulation-based learning into various teaching methods (i.e., intergroup dialogue, digital storytelling, and role plays) and present a case illustration that highlights cross-cultural social work encounters. We close with discussing challenges and new lessons learned from teaching AOP in clinical practice and future teaching recommendations.

Social work practice education and training during the pandemic: Disruptions and discoveries.

The COVID-19 pandemic evoked a disruption to social work (SW) practice education and this brief note describes discoveries made in teaching SW practice virtually. One example is Virtual Practice Fridays, adapted to build SW practice competencies online, and another example is a re-designed course on cross-cultural SW practice using simulation-based learning.

Clients and case managers as neoliberal subjects? Shaping session tasks and everyday interactions with severely mentally ill (SMI) clients

ABSTRACTThis article explores how multiple contexts – professional knowledge (e.g. case management), institutional practices (e.g. New Public Management), and mental health policies and legislations (e.g. Mental Health Act) – under neoliberal governance (re)produce ways social workers interact with their clients in moment-to-moment interactions. It is part of a larger process and outcome research project on cross-cultural social work practice in outpatient community mental health settings in an urban Canadian city. Using transcripts of audio-taped sessions between social workers and clients with severe mental illness, and inspired by critical theories of language, knowledge and power, we illustrate how neoliberal themes (re)position clients and social workers in negotiating session tasks in everyday interactions, and how these interactions shape the clients and social workers as desirable and undesirable neoliberal subjects. These detailed studies in micro-interactions can be used as practice examples in considering how social workers can be critically reflective of our own micro practice and resist the governing neoliberal ideology in the macro level.

Exploring the Meaning of Crossing and Culture: An Empirical Understanding from Practitioners' Everyday Experience

Despite the large amount of literature on cross-cultural social work practice, the meanings of culture and crossing have not been empirically examined. This article presents the findings of a study involving 30 social work practitioners in a Canadian metropolitan city. Grounded in the lived experiences of the practitioners, at least three different modes of crossing are identified. The findings also indicate that many practitioners tend to define culture as a complex whole, but not in a deterministic manner. Interwoven with race and ethnicity, culture interacts with an individual's preferences and environment. The author contends that to integrate theory and practice, we need to examine how frontline practitioners understand some important but takenfor- granted social work concepts.

Spanish Language and Cultural Immersion for Social Work Students

This article describes the pedagogical literature of cross-cultural social work practice, international social work, experiential education, service learning, and study tours, and examines the National Standards for Foreign Language Education. The authors outline the theoretical foundations and program design of one social work undergraduate program's attempt to incorporate traditional didactic classroom-based learning and experiential in-class activities with experiential non-classroom-based learning, in an effort to help students learn Spanish and increase their awareness of and sensitivity to the needs of Hispanic/Latino clients. The article details how one baccalaureate social work program developed and evaluated classes on Spanish language, Spanish culture, and a Spanish immersion study tour to Costa Rica. In addition, the article presents viable objectives, assignments, and reflective, qualitative outcomes evaluations obtained from students who enrolled in the courses and the faculty members who taught the courses.

Understanding And Misunderstanding In Cross-Cultural Practice: Further Conversations With Suwanrang

Understanding is an essential clinical practice skill, one which draws upon cognitive and affective, conscious and unconscious abilities. This paper explores the challenges posed by cross-cultural understanding. Using concepts from anthropology and data from anthropological field work and clinical practice, it examines cultural differences in the experience and communication of affect. Clinical examples from Northern Thailand are used to illustrate the ways these subtle and complex differences in clients’ affective worlds challenge our capacity to understand those who are culturally different. Implications for cross-cultural social work practice are addressed.

Representation of ethnic identity in North American social work literature: a dossier of the Chinese people.

Ethnic and cultural identities of people who are not white in North America are conceived as natural and fixed categories. Such conceptualizations are associated with a tendency to take ethnicity as a client characteristic instead of understanding ethnic and cultural differences as constituted by the engagement between social worker and client. Using Foucault's dossier approach, the author uses the Chinese people as a case example to illustrate the politics of identification and identity assignment in professional social work literature in North America. The literature was selected from the Social Work Abstracts database from 1977 to 1997. The article reveals how Chinese people are "essentialized," "otherized," and negatively positioned as an ethnic construct. Four major arguments are presented together with their implications for cross-cultural social work practice.

Suicide and North American Indians

ABSTRACT This paper considers suicide from the perspective of a particular tribal group of North American Indians-the Ojibwa (also known as the Chippewa in the U.S.). Through an exploration of the erosion and loss of the central cultural value of pimadaziwin (health, well-being, and longevity for self and family), an understanding of self-destructive thoughts and behaviors, culminating in suicide or nissitise, is presented. Implications for cross-cultural social work practice founded on intervention as social construction are offered.

Human behavior theory and social work practice

This new edition of Human Behavior Theory and Social Work Practice provides a broadly synthetic approach to selecting theoretical concepts crucial to one's activities in casework. Centered on the notion of the client as an individual and as a in the environment, Roberta Greene and the contributing authors examine the biological, psychological, and social aspects of development, and evaluate their utility for social work practice. Social work is characterized by a dynamic helping process and a diversity of roles and functions. The aims of social work-to improve societal conditions and to enhance social functioning among individuals, families, and groups-are put into action across all fi elds of practice and realized through a variety of methods in a range of settings. To work in the field, it is important to acquire conceptual frameworks that help one understand the complexities of contemporary practice. This volume is concerned with the application of knowledge about behavior in the social environment that serves as the theoretical underpinning for direct practice in social work. The chapters explore the ways in which specifi c theories have contributed to understanding the person in the environment construct and examine the idea that all clinical social work intervention is anchored in reshaping the context of the person in the environment configuration. The book explores the challenges and limitations of the various theories in use and addresses many relevant questions: What does the theory offer for understanding development across the lifecycle? What does each theory suggest about the interaction among biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors of human development and functioning? What does the theory suggest about healthy/functional and unhealthy/dysfunctional behaviors or wellness? Is theory universal in its application, and may it lend itself to cross-cultural social work practice? What role does theory propose for the social worker as an agent of change? Human Behavior Theory and Social Work Practice is an original contribution to social work theory, and will be mandatory reading for anyone pursuing a career in the field.

Education for Cross-Cultural Social Work Practice

Abstract Little attention has been given to the needs of international and American social work students who are preparing for direct practice outside of the United States. A preliminary model of cross-cultural social work practice is described as the basis for a course in direct social work practice in international settings.