Abstract
Three white female social work instructors reflect on
Introduction
The dynamics of privilege and oppression are present in social work classrooms. Instructors can be mindful of issues of power and attuned to the multiple identities of our students and ourselves; even so, our privilege remains and has an impact on our teaching. The three of us are social work educators who occupy multiple social locations and have experiences of both advantage and disadvantage as a result. In this article, we focus on the implications of teaching from various sources of privilege, including race and social class. There is a dearth of literature that supports our efforts to skillfully and effectively teach from privilege. We begin to address this gap by sharing examples from our own teaching and advising when we became conscious of biases and assumptions related to our privilege that needed to be addressed. We aim to be authentic and transparent about how we grappled with those incidents, strove to create “teachable moments,” and deepened our own development as educators. By sharing these moments publicly, we hope to encourage other social work instructors to contemplate these issues more deeply and engage in a larger discussion of how to best address the impact of our privilege.
When we enter the classroom, students immediately notice that we are able-bodied, English-speaking, white women. As we develop relationships with students, they may learn that two of us identify as heterosexual and one as lesbian. We are all married mothers whose children range from toddlers to college students. We may choose to share other parts of ourselves, such as our political views or religious beliefs, but whether explicitly stated or not, our social locations—namely, our race, social class, gender, and sexual orientation, among others—affect our worldview and, thus, affect how we practice and teach as social workers.
We approach the classroom with great awareness of our positionalities and their implications:
The Nature of Privilege
Privilege is a complex concept. It is an unearned advantage that benefits the recipient, while excluding or even harming those less advantaged (Black & Stone, 2005; McIntosh, 1988). It is a status that often exists outside of the consciousness of the person possessing it (Miller, 1976). In studying historical examples of oppression, it becomes clear that its invisibility is an important strategy; if the structures of oppression are invisible, they are perceived as inevitable and timeless. If the dominant group can convince everyone—but especially those who are oppressed—that they are, by their very nature, subordinate, then people will be less likely to challenge the injustice (Freire, 1970; Frye, 1983).
As social workers, we are bound by our Code of Ethics (National Association of Social Workers [NASW], 2008) to challenge injustice and oppression. Mattsson (2014, p. 8) notes that critical social work has “an ambition to challenge inequality, marginalization, and oppression at a structural level.” Dismantling oppression requires us to address the reality that when one group is kept down, another is lifted up (Bailey, 1998). Although awareness of the dynamics of privilege and oppression is only a first step, it is an essential part of working for social justice, which is a core value of the social work profession (NASW, 2008).
Privilege and Social Work Education
In order to practice effectively, social workers must be able to evaluate their experiences with power, oppression, and privilege (Pinderhughes, 1989). Ideally, social workers learn reflexive practices in social work education, but like our students, social work faculty members may hesitate to confront issues of power and oppression (Vodde, 2001) and may shy away from teaching material that is personally challenging or that causes discomfort in the classroom (Singleton, 1994). Kumashiro (2000, p. 43) offers an explanation: “It could…be argued that we unconsciously desire to learn only that which affirms our sense that we are good people and that we resist learning anything that reveals our complicity with racism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression.” In our experience, it is also challenging for instructors with privilege to skillfully address our own complicity with forms of oppression.
There is extensive literature on the importance of teaching
Connecting People With Privilege
When instructors acknowledge the complexity of their social locations, including sources of privilege, they model for students a way to explore their own relationship to social power. We can offer students with privilege an opportunity to identify with us. Gillespie, Ashbaugh, and DeFiore (2002, p. 245) describe, “The more students can identify with us in a way that is nonthreatening to them, the more likely they are to take our invitation to explore their own complicity in a racist system.” When we teach students about the matrix of domination (Collins, 2000), we give them a framework for understanding that oppression involves more than individuals; oppression exists as an interlocking and mutually reinforcing system. When we model a process of actively grappling with the locations we occupy in this web of privilege and oppression, we offer them a way to understand the concurrent dynamics more deeply.
As white women, we have experienced resistance from some students when we engage them in conversations about privilege. Gillespie et al. (2002) wondered whether white female students might feel skeptical or betrayed by white female instructors’ persistent focus on issues of privilege. We experience this dynamic often, as the vast majority of social work students are white women (CSWE, 2011). Using ideas from intersectionality, instructors can anticipate that students may have a range of affective and cognitive responses to issues of power and privilege, depending on where the students are in processing the meaning of their social locations. We are more effective instructors when we situate ourselves in this process and empathize about the challenges of developing greater awareness about oppression and privilege (Heinze, 2008).
Telling Privilege Stories
One way that we can situate ourselves in the process is by telling privilege stories or personal narratives that illustrate our own lived experiences of privilege. It can be difficult to acknowledge that one benefits from unequal distributions of power. Freire’s (1970) popular education approach helps people who have been oppressed describe their individual experiences and connect them to systemic inequities. This model may be more challenging for people with privilege because, at least in part, it can be more difficult for us to define our relationship with privilege. Curry-Stevens (2007, p. 46) explored how 20 community-based practitioners led training sessions for privileged learners about race, class, and gender issues. She noted that some practitioners avoided Freire’s approach because the learners struggled to discuss their experiences of privilege. The reasons for the difficulty were twofold. First, privilege can be hard to name because it can remain hidden under the guise of “normal” or “natural.” Second, speaking personally about privilege may trigger students’ defenses. For many of us with privilege, it is not easy to accept responsibility for our positions in a system that oppresses others.
Many instructors, however, make an intentional choice to talk about privilege, in spite of the potential resistance or relational consequences. By telling stories from our own lives, we demonstrate how to discuss a topic that is often taboo. It is important to note that privilege stories are not the same as narratives that reinforce dominant social arrangements (McCorkel & Myers, 2003). The purpose of a privilege story is to give a personal account of coming to see and wrestle with unearned advantages. Such stories help illuminate the dynamics of oppression, which may be obscured from view, and may urge students to consider the historical and social context of their experiences (Messner, 2011).
Decentering Our Stories
Instructors may tell stories from their lives to illustrate the realities of privilege and oppression. This kind of self-disclosure is particularly common by people who have been oppressed (Garcia & Melendez, 1997). Students have reported that an instructor’s oppressed status can be helpful in appreciating the material being taught about privilege and oppression (Hays, Dean, & Chang, 2007). As we have noted, privilege stories can provide a personal and experiential lesson for students. Instructors can engage students through their reflections about what it means to occupy certain social locations and model how to connect individual circumstances to the structural forces that shape our lives (Allen, 2009).
Despite the value in telling privilege stories, pedagogy must “be grounded in the standpoints of subordinate groups of people” (Messner, 2011, p. 12). When we teach from sources of privilege, we must ensure that our students get access to stories from the perspectives of people who have been oppressed. We can do this through films, readings, and guest speakers and by fostering the emergence of these voices in our own classrooms. Instructors with privilege can demonstrate the importance of simultaneously holding the roles of teacher and learner (Vodde, 2001) and honoring the voices and perspectives of people from oppressed groups.
Advocating for Justice
Beyond telling stories of privilege and oppression, instructors need to model for students how to take action, starting with our own classrooms. We do a disservice to our students when we teach about injustice in the world, without noticing the ways in which social inequities affect what happens within our classrooms. By calling attention to the presence and effects of our privilege in the classroom, we can help students learn to recognize and name privilege and model the skills necessary to question and challenge inequity. In doing so, we are helping students to develop self-awareness about their own identities and access to power, as well as the skills they need for social work practice.
Cochran-Smith (2000) reflected on her experience as a faculty member in an education program. Although she felt she worked hard to address race in her classes and the program, many students of color perceived the program as “doing
Although we have experienced oppression due to our social locations—particularly our gender and, for one of us, sexual orientation—we acknowledge our sources of privilege and are aware that they affect our teaching. There is a real gap in the social work literature about how to model a constructive, critical relationship to privilege in our classrooms. In the following section, we begin to name and describe the manifestations and effects of teaching from privilege.
Our Reflections on Teaching From Privilege
There are many moments in our teaching when we are unintentionally guided by our privilege. These moments do not occur just in classes focusing on issues of oppression and privilege. In fact, for those classes, we usually feel better prepared for the challenges that are common when teaching about diversity issues, including being attuned to dynamics of difference, anticipating uncomfortable discussions, and being ready to share stories from our personal and professional lives. In all of our classes, we could think of instances when our privilege created a lack of awareness on our part that had the potential to impede student learning.
The three of us teach at social work schools in the Boston area. Collectively, we have spent 26 years in the classroom, teaching social work students who are predominantly, like us, white women. Unlike us, the majority of the students in our classrooms are in their 20s; our classes have also included students whose identities are different from ours in ways that are both visible and invisible. Although we have had access to some institutional support in our role as instructor, we often rely on informal connections with colleagues for much of our consultation and support. It was in this way that this article began; we shared with each other challenging moments in our teaching and found a theme emerging: there were times when our privilege resulted in bias or impeded our attunement to student learning needs. We were concerned that these instances had a negative effect on our teaching, and we were eager to have a place to talk about these issues, gain more insight into our unintentional complicity with oppression, and develop greater skills to navigate these moments.
As we talked together about our experiences, we turned to the professional literature for guidance. There, we found limited material to support our efforts to understand the impact of our privilege and teach from privilege in a skillful and effective way. In this article, we begin to address this gap by sharing and reflecting upon examples from our teaching. Our process started with conversations in which we spoke directly and openly and supported each other with learning from the discomfort. When we decided to write about our experiences, we each selected two examples from our teaching that illustrated an aspect of teaching from privilege. We chose situations that were particularly salient for us; perhaps they were interactions we were still thinking about, had learned the most from, or that resonated with each of us. We purposely selected examples that highlight different sources of our privilege and that arose when teaching different courses, including serving as a field instructor and supporting students’ professional development in their field placements.
In the sections that follow, we share the examples and our reflections and then suggest implications for teaching. These are jarring moments—likely for our students as well as for us—that remain on our minds long after the class finishes. In some cases, we immediately became aware of the issue, often because a student drew our attention to it with a comment, complaint, or concern. In effect, they “called us out” and concomitantly turned our invisible privilege visible. In other instances, we realized what happened later, when reflecting on the class, student work, or course evaluations. There are likely times when our privilege remains unnoticed by us, although some of our students likely notice and are affected by it. The examples illustrate moments in which our privilege led us to make assumptions or decisions that supported the existing scaffolding of privilege, rather than acknowledging the needs and realities of all students.
Assumptions About Students’ Social Locations
One manifestation of privilege is the communication of what is “normal” (Bailey, 1998; McIntosh, 1988). If we make assumptions about our students, we will miss the diversity present in our classrooms. For students from marginalized backgrounds, we risk silencing their voices, invalidating their experiences, and unintentionally labeling them “abnormal.” Hidden social locations, like social class, religion, or sexual orientation, are particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon as the following example illustrates: A social policy class consisted primarily of white women in their 20s; however, this was an evening class, so many were older students, in their 30s through 40s, attending class after a full day of work. The diversity present in this class was greater than in many social work classes; about a third of the class identified as Latino or black
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, and there were several men. One of the assignments was to live on a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) budget for a week and write a reflection paper about the experience. The objective was to learn about SNAP experientially so that students could gain more knowledge and insight about the program through their own brief lived experience. We talked in-depth about the assignment, including the surprises students encountered during this project. The surprise I (RM) encountered, however, was that although they were silent in class, two students wrote in their papers that they had not learned anything from this assignment because previously, they lived on SNAP benefits.
I decided to return to this discussion in the next class by acknowledging my assumptions and noting the reality of diverse lived experiences in the class. For students who, like me, had not experienced poverty and were not aware of their peers’ backgrounds, the discussion may have planted the seed for growing awareness of their own privilege and of the diversity among social workers. After raising the issue, all the students seemed more comfortable speaking about their experiences, and some students chose to share their expertise about SNAP with the class.
Marginalization of Some Social Locations
Instructors make decisions about what they teach and how they teach it. Since instructors are in a position of power within the classroom, these decisions convey a message about who and what is valued. When teaching about oppression and privilege, the inclusion or exclusion of particular material may send an unintended message about which social locations are meaningful and which ones are not, as illustrated by the following example: In a course on the dynamics of oppression, I (AD) engage students in an exercise about privilege. Using McIntosh’s (1988) teaching strategy, I circulate lists of common examples of different kinds of privilege, including white privilege, male privilege, upper-class privilege, heterosexual privilege, and able-bodied privilege. I ask students to read the lists and note their reactions. The lists tend to evoke a range of responses, particularly from students who have not considered how their privilege manifests in everyday experiences. While this particular class included mostly white, able-bodied women, there were students with invisible differences and diverse life experiences who had varying levels of awareness about their privilege. The only transgender student in the class asked me why I had not included a list for cis-gender privilege. I fumbled with my response. I suggested that we could learn about the nature of privilege from the other lists, and that they were not going to be inclusive of every form of privilege. The next week the student came to class with a cis-gender privilege list that he constructed and offered it to his peers and me; with his permission, I have continued to use it in subsequent classes.
In deciding what forms of privilege would be examined, I contributed to the invisibility and invalidation of some forms of oppression. Perhaps more significantly, I missed an opportunity to support a student who advocated for the needs of an oppressed group, which is a skill we want to nurture and grow in all our social work students. In hindsight, I wish that I had owned my mistake, instead of becoming defensive. I could have initiated a discussion with the class about the effects of my decision and asked the class to identify other missing privilege lists.
The Invisibility of the Needs of Social Work Students of Color
When instructors design syllabi and prepare learning exercises, our privilege often unconsciously guides both our choices of materials and our perceptions of students. In the following example, the instructor’s white privilege caused her to overlook the learning needs of students: In a clinical practice class, the week’s topic was working with clients of a different race. The students were predominately white women in their 20s; there were several older women and several who identified as black or Latina. During the class discussion, a black woman in her 40s raised her hand and asked why the readings on the syllabus all focused on white social workers working with black clients. She wanted a reading that could guide her and other black workers in their work with white clients, particularly when a client expressed prejudice. She proceeded to describe to the class a difficult, painful encounter she had had in the past week with an intoxicated, white client espousing racist ideas. Her white supervisor seemed at a loss as to how to help her with either her feelings or this particular client.
Prompted by the student’s comment, I (RM) had to decide whether to spend some time on this topic or stay focused on the original lesson plan. Even after deciding to stay with the student’s question, I faced a second decision: whether to address the explicit questions about the issues related to race that were raised in the student’s placement or the implicit questions the student was asking: Where are the articles that relate to
In addition to modeling openness and holding ourselves accountable, these conversations offer an invitation to students who may have felt marginalized to speak up and make their experiences known. In fact, when we had this discussion in class, several other students of color expressed feeling the same way about the readings; nowhere in their social work education had they found themselves assigned readings about practicing as a worker of color with white clients. They did not feel that the curriculum was designed for them. We were able to have a discussion that not only looked at the implications of racism in this one clinical example but also within the structure of social work education, in both the classroom and the field.
An Empathic Failure Due to Privileged Worldview
In addition to obscuring structural inequities, our privilege can limit our perception of the varied learning needs of our students and the differential impact that certain materials will have on them. Sometimes we can anticipate that particular content will be challenging for students and may encourage them to engage with the material to the extent that they are comfortable. Students generally feel respected and understood when we are attuned to what they are experiencing in our classroom. When our privilege compromises our ability to be attuned, students may perceive us as insensitive or worse, as described in the following example: In a course on the dynamics of oppression, all of the students were women, and more than half were people of color. I (AD) connect the curriculum to our local area: Boston. It is important for them to know the city’s history with race and racism, particularly the city’s busing and desegregation crisis in the 1970s, as wounds persist from that era of recent history. The majority of students were in their 20s and had not experienced these events personally. I begin by showing a segment from the PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” which chronicles the events with firsthand accounts and TV footage. About 5 min into the video, an African American older female student came up to my desk and whispered that she would be leaving class. She and I stepped into the hallway to talk privately. She explained that she had lived through the busing crisis as an adolescent, and it was traumatic for her to revisit. She mentioned a few times that I probably wouldn’t understand, and she didn’t want to explain it to me further and left. I consulted with colleagues about the situation and struggled to connect with the student over the course of the semester.
While I was aware that the course would affect students on an emotional and personal level, I did not expect any student to feel “traumatized” by this topic or specific video. I am certain that my whiteness, my younger age, and my nonnative Boston status were among the factors and forms of privilege that affected my perceptions about the course materials. In hindsight, I wish that I had introduced it in a more thoughtful and careful way to honor the fact that our social locations and personal histories affect how we experience painful, provocative, or challenging material.
Modeling Skills for Students
As educators in a professional program, we model skills for students that they will take into the field and use with clients. This is one of the benefits of being clinician/educators and it comes with great responsibility. In order for our students to develop the skills to recognize and address issues of privilege with their clients, we need to demonstrate them, such as how to disclose our privileged identities, discuss the limitations of our worldview, and engage with the lived experiences of people who have been oppressed. If we model avoidance instead of reflection and self-awareness, students may take those tendencies into the field and hold back from being true advocates for social justice. The following example illustrates how privilege can become unveiled and provides an opportunity to talk about its effects: At the beginning of my course, I (BM) was learning the names of the students. As an instructor, I think it is very important to know their names. This one afternoon, when the students sat down, I started to go around the room, naming each of the students. It was a class of 20, a relatively large class for our school, and I got most of the names right. Some students expressed feeling impressed that I knew the vast majority of their names, and it was tempting to relish the moment. But I had made two errors, and I recognized that my errors were category based. As was typical in the classes I taught, the majority of the students were young white women, but in this class, there were a couple of exceptions. There were two young black women in the class, and when I got to the first one, I said the name of the other black student, and when I got to one of two middle-aged white women in the class, I called her the name of the other middle-aged white woman.
When I had that realization, I had a choice to make. I could go on with the class as planned or I could highlight what I had done and use it as an opportunity for learning. I paused only briefly before asking if anyone had noticed anything about the mistakes I had made. If they had, no one spoke up, so I acknowledged to the class what I had recognized about how my brain categorized the students based on race and age. Unexpected learning opportunities can emerge as a result of the ways that dynamics of difference show up in our classrooms.
Being an Ally for Marginalized Students
The “signature pedagogy” in the social work profession is field education (CSWE, 2008). In many schools of social work, faculty members connect classroom learning with the realities of the field by teaching field seminar and serving as field instructors. In this role, we work with both students and outside supervisors who may occupy social locations different from our own. We are conscious that supervisors are busy, and that our field departments depend on supervisors taking our students. We want to support the learning of all of our students and partner well with our supervisors. In this context, we can try to model conversations about social locations and their role in the learning and in the supervisory relationship. I (BM) worked as a field instructor for MSW students. One year I worked with a young black woman who was placed at a hospital mental health unit. All the professional staff, including her supervisor, were white; the mental health workers (MWH) were all people of color. The student had worked previously as a MHW and shared with me that she struggled to make the transition from her identity as a MHW to a social worker. She spoke about the natural ease she felt with the MHWs on the unit and that the white professional staff did not seem to notice her. She felt guarded with her supervisor who had not raised the topic of racial dynamics and racial identity, and how their racial difference might affect the student’s experience. When I proposed that she and I meet with her supervisor to talk about this, the student was initially lukewarm about the idea. She worried about how her supervisor would respond, whether she would feel criticized, whether the conversation might make things worse instead of better. I could appreciate these concerns and told the student the decision was up to her, but I continued to encourage a meeting. The student ultimately agreed to give it a try, and we went forward with it. Fortunately, the meeting went well. The supervisor was open and willing to engage, and the student reported feeling that her learning needs were now in focus.
I wanted to support the student, but I was aware that I did not have all the answers. I was concerned with creating a space within which the supervisor could hear the student’s concerns without feeling put on the defensive. I wanted to find a balance between asking the student to speak for herself and advocating for her supervisory needs. Addressing race felt like an important component of quality supervision, not an idiosyncratic desire. I wanted to model for the student a way to talk about these issues, very aware that, as a white person, my experience as a student had been very different from hers. I had always had supervisors who shared my racial identity, which was a manifestation of privilege.
Implications for Teaching
When instructors acknowledge our privileged social locations, we can consider their effects within our classrooms. The process of coming to see privilege is an intentional and ongoing choice. With critical thinking and self-reflection, those in positions of privilege may recognize the impact of that privilege on their worldview and relationships. According to Vodde (2001, p. 149), “a prerequisite for reflecting on one’s privilege is an inclination to question that which has been unquestionable.” In our teaching, we intentionally try to “question the unquestionable” within ourselves and model that behavior for our students. Our questioning makes spaces for our students to engage in critical reflection as well, about what happens in class, in the field, and in the larger social environment. This stance conveys a message that many instructors believe is implicit in social work education: this classroom is a place to discuss, explore, and analyze issues of oppression and privilege. When instructors value these conversations, we create a context in which students can be more adept at addressing their own complex relationships to privilege and oppression.
Often the social work literature assumes—implicitly or explicitly—that social workers are white and middle class, among other social locations, and responds to their needs and interests. Ortega and Busch-Armendariz (2014, p. 5) comment that, “social work scholarship continues to be shaped by a dominant paradigm that controls knowledge production.” Thus, empirical research and practice-oriented literature tend to focus on the needs of members of dominant groups. The experiences of those who do not fit in this mold become hidden and silenced. By replicating this marginalization in our syllabi and other course materials, we curtail learning about the realities of practice that our students encounter in the field. Instructors need to challenge the false belief that all social workers are similar in background and experience and teach to the diverse needs of the students in front of us. Instructors must consider how all students experience our classrooms. It is not the responsibility of students, especially those from oppressed groups, to notice and challenge our privilege and its effects. It is our responsibility to continually and critically reflect on our biases and be accountable for our privilege.
Our classrooms are situated within educational institutions that may not fully support teaching that challenges systems of power and privilege. We can advocate for the professional development resources and opportunities needed to do this work, such as to the option to coteach across difference, the creation of teaching circles, and mentorship from seasoned faculty members. These reflective and relational practices involve intentionality and require an investment of time and resources on the part of the institution. Faculty members must be also willing to be vulnerable and occupy the position of learner. In fact, Freire (1970) rejected the dichotomy between teacher and student, as we are always simultaneously engaged in both roles. Instructors who are less experienced in the classroom or concerned about evaluations of their teaching may be more reluctant to acknowledge their limitations and reflect openly with colleagues or students. Nevertheless, these are among the structural forces we contend with, and we can use our privilege to advocate for the institutional support and resources needed to be more effective, ethical, and skillful in the classroom.
Conclusion
Our examples highlight that instructors with privilege need to remain vigilant of how our privilege affects who we are, what we teach, and how we teach it. No matter how carefully we prepare or attempt to anticipate the dynamics, we are bound to have moments when our privilege manifests in the classroom. We strive to respond in a way that demonstrates an openness to discuss, question, and grow, and a commitment to be accountable for our actions and choices. It is imperative that we also contextualize our teaching within the social structures that shape and reinforce power relations (Mattsson, 2014). As challenging as this work can be, it is an opportunity to enact the social work profession’s values and to consider our teaching to be a political and justice-promoting act. In addition, it allows us the joy of becoming more self-aware, more skillful as instructors, and more authentically connected to students and colleagues across difference.
Footnotes
Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Wade Taylor, PhD, and Roy Old Person, MSW, for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.