Challenging and Changing AntiOppressive Practice

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Challenging and Changing Anti-Oppressive Practice

• Dharman Jeyasingham Julie Morton
• University of Salford
• JSWEC 2005

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Structure of Presentation

• Difficulties of existing approaches.
• What influenced our approach.
• What we have done.
• Continuing dilemmas.

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Origins

• Our own experience of anti-oppressive practice as
  students, practitioners and teachers.
• Challenging oppression seen as a process to go
  through on social work programmes-
  self-discovery, initiation rite.
• Seen as a subject, something fixed, can be
  understood and learnt about and then put into
  practice.

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Action Learning

• Adoption of action learning for the MA programme.
• Consideration of innovative methods rather than
  solely pedagogical.
• Compatible with our approach to the module.
• Action learning has potential to assist students
  with critical reflection and an active engagement
  with learning.

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Module Structure
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Hierarchies of oppression

• Opposite ideas about the validity or not of
  hierarchies of oppression rely on some of the
  same assumptions
• Social structures are real, rather than
  constructions that enable us to conceptualise
  disparate social relations.
• Oppression can be fully understood through
  attention to race, gender, class, disability,
  sexuality and age.
• Oppression is accumulative according to the
  number of social structures in which you are
  oppressed.

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Rational approach

• Traditional teaching on AOP has the status of
  objective knowledge.
• Tool-kit approach with straightforward
  application in practice.
• Competency based approaches.
• Discrete module-taught, assessed and completed.
• Climate of certainty.

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Assumptions Identity-based approaches to
teaching Sexuality and homophobia

• Homophobia is a material and discrete entity.
• Homophobia only affects specific social/sexual
  minorities.
• It is more urgent to examine homophobia (as a
  systems of oppression) than heterosexuality (a a
  system of privilege).
• Teaching about homophobia should only be done by
  people who have experienced homophobia. These
  people are lesbians and gay men.

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Practice/Theory

• Did not aim to provide knowledge and skills for
  practice.
• Theory cannot provide a map for practice.
• Deliberate decision not to focus on practice as
  real.
• Attempt to unsettle this particular dichotomy.
• Did want to begin process of scrutinising
  knowledge available in practice.

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Analogising

• The assumption that by experiencing
  marginalisation or oppression one can understand
  and empathise with how it might be for others.
• Teaching uses analogising in a non-critical way
  and leaves out the limitations of this approach.
• Assumption of equivalence for different forms of
  oppressive structures and experience of them.
• Example Comparison of racism and sexism
  -essentialist, renders experience of black women
  invisible.

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Influences cultural studies

• Interdisciplinary subject, which enables us to
  question how psychological and sociological
  understandings can be sustained by the same
  paradigms.
• Deconstruction of representation.
• Critical attention to identity.

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Deconstructing Representation
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Deconstructing Representation
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Identification

• Little attention to identification, except within
  narrow psychological terms.
• Importance of examining how identities are
  represented, constructed, negotiated
• Privilege Masculinity, Whiteness.

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Postmodernist influence

• Offers possibilities for AOP teaching in that it
  enables thinking about how discourses manufacture
  knowledge.
• Social work as a discourse which creates
  knowledge and imposes limits.
• Exposes dichotomous thinking and the problems
  with defining people as other than the
  mainstream.

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Method

• Write a three-line description of yourself
  including aspects of yourself which are most
  significant to you personally and in terms of
  your social experience.
• How has your original description changed and
  what informed the adaptation?
• Consider whether any shift has created anxieties
  or opened up possibilities for you.
• Have theories of identity and power assisted you
  to think critically about your experiences?

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Concluding comments

• Students expectations of AOP how do we do it?
• Authentic experience and victimhood.
• Prevalence of dogma.
• Emphasis on competence.
• Limitations of approach-can be misinterpreted as
  uncritical relativism.
• No value in naming oppression.
• Modular delivery how to integrate critical
  thinking/critical reflection/reflexivity into
  other areas of the curriculum.