Transformative Social Work Research Articles

A preliminary exploration on transformative social work model in China: a case study on social work with migrant construction workers

Migrant workers in the Chinese construction industry have been described as ‘indenture labourers of the twenty-first Century’. Under the guise of flexible work and high salary, there exist serious problems such as lack of an employment contract, poor working conditions, and the delay of payment. The origin of these problems lies in the subcontracting production regime of the construction industry that masks its labour relationships. The system also makes the intervention of industrial social work, labour rights protection and advocacy of corporate social responsibility ineffective. Based on a case of a migrant construction worker service organization, this study provides preliminary explorations on an indigenous model called ‘transformative social work’ in China. This model includes long-term education to raise civil and class consciousness, encouraging workers to fight for their own rights, facilitating the development of workers' union, connecting the support from university student volunteers and university teachers, striving for the empowerment of migrant construction workers, and the transformation of the production regime.

Being Unsettled as a Space of Possibility

“Unsettling Feminism(s): Disrupting the Center, Dismantling Oppressions, Transforming Social Work” took place on May 22–24, 2011 in the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Three participants in the “unconference” reflect on how the conference realized its intent of “unsettling” current thinking and expanding the possibility for transformative and emancipator action. While the unconference provided space for a generative dialogue among a rich diversity of participants, multiple spaces are required for interrogating, integrating, and building multiracial feminism/feminisms and knowledge for the transformative social work we envision as possible.

Integrating Critical Consciousness into Direct Social Work Practice: A Pedagogical View

An unnecessary and unfortunate divide has existed historically within social work both in the United States and also in the United Kingdom between social reform or anti-oppressive practice, and direct social work practice or social care. In this article, the limitations of such a dichotomy will be explored, and ways that social work educators may more effectively integrate critical reflection approaches into their pedagogical practices will be identified. Building upon Denzin's methodological elaboration of C. Wright Mills' concept of private troubles–public issues, this article will discuss the usefulness of applying methods from critical, interpretive qualitative research to help social workers achieve critical consciousness in social work education and practice. This article will also address ways to help social work students overcome impediments to achieving critical consciousness, including the anxiety attendant upon changing one's belief systems. Finally, this article will describe the development of a concentration-year MSW elective, Transformative Social Work Practice, which sought to assist social work students in becoming more critically reflexive in their clinical work.

Prying open the space for social work in the new millennium

Social work in the United Kingdom faces all manner of woes. Critical public inquiries, disgruntled users of the service, the bureaucratisation of practice, problems with recruitment, and the overhaul of training, all continue to reinforce a culture of pessimism. It has been suggested that social work in the United Kingdom stands at the crossroads where a decision must be made either to accept these depressing conditions as they are, or to challenge them by asserting a new future for a reinvigorated profession. The latter option is supported by the authors of this article because we share the view that as social workers we have available to us discursive freedom with which to analyse the profession's contemporary ailments and to find a way through them based on a discourse of social justice. The idea and practice of discursive freedom can be captured in the heuristic notion of 'space' which the authors use here as a shared focus for analysing contemporary social work from four different critical perspectives. In this way a dialogue is promoted between theory and practice and within critical theory. In its method and its results this inquiry is still very much work-in-progress. This provisional quality sits comfortably with the notion of 'space' and gives rein to its recursive qualities. These qualities, it is argued, must lie at the heart of transformative social work.

A Teaching Framework for Transformative Multicultural Social Work Education

A major challenge in multicultural social work education is fostering meaningful learning experiences for students by matching educational methods and content to students' individual learning needs and characteristics. Building upon transformative learning theory developed by Jack Mezirow, this paper proposes a teaching framework for transformative multicultural social work education that addresses students' individual learning needs and characteristics. This framework uses the dimensions of cultural knowledge and cultural sensitivity to represent four potential stances of cross-cultural learning in students. The paper provides a detail discussion regarding the learning needs and learning foci of students at each stance, and useful teaching strategies and activities that enhance students' transformative learning process so that they develop integrative knowledge about self and others in a dynamic multicultural society from multiple perspectives.