Resumen de Teaching activism, ecological justiceand sustainable development: pedagogical endeavours in professional social work education
Matthew M. Hurley, F. O Sullivan
‘Environmental degradation is a pressing, global problem and is concentrated in oppressedpopulations and oppressed geographical regions. This matters to our [social work] clients. Thehuman impacts of environmental challenges fall most heavily on those whom social workers are mostaccountable’ (Teixeira & Krings, 2015, p. 524). This powerful statement resonates with the humanisticand emancipatory values of social work with roots in social justice (Howe, 2009). However, it is thisvery emphasis on social justice, with its anthropocentric focus to the exclusion of the rest of the planet,which social work needs to address if the profession is going to play their part in helping service users’deal with the worst impacts of climate change. Environmental justice, green social work and ecologicaljustice are largely absent from the social work education curriculum in Ireland. As social workeducators, we believe the role of social work education demands a pedagogical commitment to developsocial responsibility and awareness amongst our students. From our own experiences of being involvedin social action in Ireland in LGBT+ rights and environmental campaigns we learned the power ofgroups coming together to develop critical consciousness (Friere, 2000/2014) to influence social change.This paper outlines our pedagogical endeavours in grappling with how best to teach activism in analready full, demanding professional social work programme. We discuss our piloted workshop with acohort of first year postgraduate social work students. We outline our approach in creating a discursiveand exploratory learning space, where students were invited to discuss the external and internalbarriers to, and benefits of social work activism. Finally this paper presents survey findings aboutstudents’ experiences of activism, which we carried out following the workshop. The results showedthat less than half the students were involved in any form of social action and of those that were nonewere involved with the environment, climate change and sustainable development goals. We concludethat there is a basic gap in social work students’ critical awareness of globalisation and its impacts onsocial work at local and international levels. This deficit needs to be addressed as part our commitmentto integrating social responsibility in our teaching.
