Pushing Back the Margins

In the United States, policies are being enacted to ban critical pedagogies in the classroom at alarming rates, creating multiple challenges to teach social justice concepts effectively. Opponents of these concepts seek to punish those who teach them by law, attempting to silence those who would speak about marginalization and thus allow oppression to continue unrestrained. However, social workers must be able to address and challenge structural racism as a foundation of ethical practice and it is our duty to combat these dangerous restrictions. One way to disrupt this cycle is through the intentional use of anti-oppressive pedagogies, which often emphasize the concept of reflexivity and the repositioning of marginalized voices to a more centralized viewpoint. These perspectives are moving to the forefront of social work education as the profession increasingly recognizes and grapples with issues of power and oppression internally. In this article, two U.S.-based social work professors address the challenges of working in a hostile sociopolitical climate and share effective strategies for resistance. The authors present specific recommendations for increasing anti-oppressive commitment in social work education while attempting to help the reader gain a deeper understanding of the complex interaction between social work and racial disparities in the U.S., discuss why this matters on a global scale, and improve reader ability to recognize common academic practices which marginalize non-dominant voices and perpetuate inequity.