Epistemic Pluralism,Open Inquiry,and Constructive Disagreement: Strengthening the 2029 EPAS

The Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE, 2026) shape not only curriculum and assessment, but also the intellectual formation and culture of the social work profession. As the accrediting framework for programs across the United States, the EPAS articulate the definition of competent practice and what constitutes a shared professional identity (Zuchowski, 2024). Yet accreditation standards necessarily do more than articulate competencies; they can also shape which perspectives are institutionally centered and normalized (Sue, 2010). Professional education operates not only through explicit curricular content, but through implicit norms governing what questions may be asked, which perspectives are considered legitimate, and how disagreement is handled (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015). Because EPAS revisions occur only once every seven years, each iteration exerts long-term influence on the profession's norms and priorities, shaping social work practice for years thereafter.

In this editorial, we argue the 2022 EPAS (CSWE, 2022) may inadvertently constrict the range of acceptable thought in social work education, thereby narrowing the scope of practices the profession may employ to address complex social problems. Across successive revisions, the EPAS have moved from broadly articulated professional values toward increasingly prescriptive competencies and, most recently, toward the institutionalization of antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) as arguably the central organizing paradigm for social work education and, by implication, practice.

Without question we all favor working against racism and promoting the core values of our profession. We represent diverse viewpoints related to ADEI principles: Some of us are proponents of ADEI (e.g., Hodge et al., 2009), others incorporate elements of ADEI into our scholarship and pedagogy (e.g., Hughes et al., 2012; Lens, 2019; Rueda, 2025), while others of us reject the specifics of ADEI as an ideology yet are supportive of broad goals related to social justice, human rights, and the like (e.g., Farber & Fram, 2024; Twis, 2025). Our shared concern pertains to the elevation of one paradigm to organize professional education and thus influence professional practice. Privileging ADEI over other frameworks leaves social work less rather than more equipped to innovate in ways that can only emerge from the interplay of diverse paradigms (Kuhn, 1970).

We begin with a brief review of the evolution of EPAS, followed by the rationale for our concerns about their recent trajectory. We then introduce the academic principles of epistemic pluralism, open inquiry, and constructive disagreement as essential correctives to this trajectory. Finally, we offer suggestions for integrating these principles into the 2029 EPAS, including some potential ideas related to program mission statements, explicit and implicit curriculum, assessment, and the nine social work competencies.

The Evolution of EPAS and the Rationale for Concern

To situate our basic concerns with the 2022 EPAS, it may be helpful to briefly review the evolution of accreditation standards within the social work profession and how the profession's approach to engaging human diversity has evolved with them. In 1928, the first standards were published to guide the formal accreditation of schools of professional social work (Association of Professional Schools of Social Work, 1928). They were sparse, requiring little more than that professional social work programs provide a curriculum including generalist courses such as ethics and the history of the profession, alongside more specialized content on practice techniques, specific populations, and practice settings (Association of Professional Schools of Social Work, 1928).

As accreditation standards evolved over time, pedagogical requirements remained limited even as administrative and institutional expectations grew more numerous and prescribed, and the underlying values of the profession more clearly articulated. This development occurred in close chronological proximity to the establishment of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) in 1955 and its inaugural Code of Ethics in 1960, which was revised in 1967 to include the principle of nondiscrimination (NASW, n.d.; Reamer, 2023). For instance, the 1965 Manual of Accrediting Standards (CSWE, 1965) affirmed the profession's commitment to scientific inquiry as a means of advancing the profession and emphasized the importance of “compassionate respect” within practice (p. 54) without prescribing specific perspectives.

This emphasis later expanded into a call for nondiscrimination in “all aspects of the organization and program of the school,” along with the expectation that programs enrich the learning environment “by providing racial and cultural diversity in student body, faculty, and staff” (CSWE, 1971, p. 6). By 1994, standards in the Accreditation Standards and Self-Study Guides had more specific institutional and administrative program requirements. This version also included a nondiscrimination and human diversity evaluative standard requiring that all accredited programs “make specific, continuous efforts to provide a learning context in which understanding and respect for diversity … are practiced” (CSWE, 1994, p. 84). With this iteration of the standards, CSWE established the pattern of revising accreditation standards every seven years.

In 2001 these standards were renamed the Educational Policy and Standards (EPAS), the terminology still used today. The earliest iteration of the EPAS continued to emphasize a professional obligation to social justice and preparation for practice with diverse populations, while leaving individual social work programs considerable pedagogical flexibility in how these principles were expressed. Specifically, the 2001 EPAS (CSWE, 2001) positioned the profession's core values at the forefront of the document as guiding principles, making them central to social work education while allowing institutions significant discretion in how they interpreted these values and defined the profession's role in addressing complex social problems.

The introduction of competency-based education in the 2008 EPAS (CSWE, 2008) marked a structural shift toward measurable learning outcomes and greater program accountability for students’ preparation for practice. Within this competency model, respecting all people and promoting social justice remained core professional obligations. However, rather than serving primarily as an organizing framework of values for social work education writ large, these obligations became embedded within a standardized competency structure.

For the first time in 2008 the EPAS competency titled “Engage Diversity and Difference in Practice” defined dimensions of diversity and introduced the concept that culture may produce structures that either privilege or oppress individuals and groups (CSWE, 2008). Because this content was embedded within a competency, accredited social work programs were then required to demonstrate how students translated this knowledge into competent social work practice, as defined by the EPAS operationalization of diversity and its association with experiences of privilege and oppression. The 2015 EPAS (CSWE, 2015) retained the same competency-based structure for social work education, further specifying dimensions of diversity and elaborating on how these dimensions can contribute to privilege or oppression.

Together, the 2008 and 2015 EPAS versions elevated previously articulated broad values-based expectations related to human diversity and nondiscrimination into competency-based requirements to be demonstrated and assessed. In so doing, they laid the groundwork for the gradual strengthening of structural analyses of oppression and inequality as central interpretive frameworks for defining and understanding diversity within the standards.

Importantly, structural analyses of oppression and inequality are commonly rooted in postmodern and critical theoretical traditions (Bell, 1992; Delgado & Stefancic, 2023; Derrida et al., 1981; Foucault, 1980; Lyotard, 1984/1979; Marcuse, 1969). However, these traditions represent only one general approach to explaining inequality, social injustice, human rights violations, and their implications for professional action (Berlin, 1969; Drake & Hodge, 2022; Gambrill, 2025). Other philosophical and theoretical traditions offer different interpretations of the causes of injustice, and different conceptions of what constitutes appropriate social work intervention. These include, for example, liberal rights-based frameworks, capabilities approaches, and empirically driven policy models that focus on measurable drivers of inequality—approaches that, in fact, frequently have stronger empirical support than antioppressive social work (Gambrill, 2025; Okantey et al., 2025). Such alternatives, though widely accepted within the larger scholarly knowledge base, are relatively under-represented in the current EPAS.

These steady shifts in social work education culminated in the 2022 EPAS, which introduced the competency, “Engage Anti-Racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (ADEI) in Practice.” We recognize that for many social workers, ADEI functions as a core interpretive worldview through which justice, rights, and professional ethics are understood and enacted. Like these colleagues, our personal and professional values are shaped by the fundamental values of social work. Our concern arises when ADEI is institutionalized as the sole mandated educational framework, which it arguably was in the 2022 EPAS.

In addition to revising competency language related to engaging human diversity, the 2022 standards extended ADEI expectations across multiple dimensions of program operation, including the explicit curriculum and elements of the implicit curriculum such as admissions practices, faculty recruitment and retention, governance, and program culture (CSWE, 2022). In this sense, ADEI is now framed not only as a learning outcome (as in the 2008 and 2015 “Engage Diversity and Difference in Practice” competencies), but also as an institutional orientation shaping the broader environment of social work education (c.f., E.P. 2.0).

As generally understood within our profession, ADEI refers not simply to the longstanding aspiration to promote a more just society—an aspiration that has long defined social work—but to one particular approach to knowledge and practice informed by postmodernism and critical theories. It is this singular philosophical entrenchment that raises concern. After all, justice approaches drawn from economics and law have clarifying principles, guiding policies, and strong empirical backing to support their use on behalf marginalized groups (e.g., Anand & Van Hees, 2006; Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 2009). Yet these frameworks are not accorded equal status in the EPAS, restricting the conceptual tools that might be marshalled to address problems that are taught in schools of social work. Adherence to one overarching paradigm—of any type—limits the profession's ability to advance social justice and generate new approaches to persistent social problems (Popper, 1945). We are not the first to raise this concern (CSWE, 2021), as numerous social work educators and practitioners raised similar misgivings during the formal stakeholder consultation process for the 2022 EPAS (CSWE, 2021). Nevertheless, we believe it is vitally important to widely circulate the concern once again as the profession approaches the development of the 2029 EPAS.

Philosophers and theorists across centuries have cautioned against ideological conformity as a force that produces intellectual stagnation, constriction, and passivity. Mill (1859/2003) argued that freedom to challenge prevailing ideas is essential to a flourishing society. A century later, Berlin (1969) stated that the broadest social good could only be realized within conditions that allow people to navigate enduring disagreement rather than resolving such disagreement through enforced conformity. Nietzsche (1878/1996)), meanwhile, cautioned that convictions insulated from questioning are insidious threats to truth, while Marcuse (1969) stated that societies can unintentionally compress the range of permissible thought, normalizing certain frameworks over others.

Further, political scientists and educational philosophers as diverse as Habermas (1998), Rawls (2005), Arendt (1961), and Dewey (1927) argued that the vibrancy and legitimacy of public institutions—including public-facing institutions like higher education and professions like social work—depend on open deliberation among diverse viewpoints. Indeed, authentic deliberation among diverse viewpoints, of the kind called for by these thinkers, requires both (a) the inclusion of marginalized voices (i.e., epistemic justice; Fricker, 2007) (Arendt, 1961), and (b) a willingness to engage with competing perspectives (Dewey, 1927; Habermas, 1998). Without this openness, intellectual life and what people view as truth risks collapsing into a power struggle in which the dominant voice simply reflects whoever currently holds institutional authority (Hayek, 2011; Sue, 2010).

As Chomsky and colleagues (1998) observed, people can be kept passive and obedient when the range of acceptable opinion is grossly restricted, even as very lively debate occurs within that range. Social work is not immune to this dynamic. Even in a profession committed to justice, constricting various philosophical paradigms within educational policies and accreditation standards can narrow the spectrum of acceptable viewpoints, constraining authentic pluralism and the constructive disagreement that produces better solutions to injustice than groupthink.

In a genuinely pluralistic society marked by profound social, cultural, and individual heterogeneity, social workers routinely encounter clients, communities, policymakers, and colleagues whose worldviews differ from their own. Yet the case for epistemic pluralism extends beyond preparing students to effectively engage a diverse society, a professional objective so many students hold (Braganza & Hodge, 2024; Deepak et al., 2015; Hansford et al., 2017). The capacity to question assumptions, critically examine dominant frameworks, and engage respectfully with competing interpretations is intrinsic to ethical social work, the scientific advancement of professional practice, and the work of academics. For the roles of higher education and social work to remain vibrant and credible in the eyes of the public we serve, we cannot assume that debate confined to a single dominant paradigm is enough to sustain the pluralism necessary for a legitimate and thriving profession (Duarte et al., 2015; Revers & Traunmüller, 2020).

Our concern with the 2022 EPAS, therefore, is with the institutional privileging of any one framework such as ADEI in ways that protect it from critical examination. From this perspective, the central challenge for future EPAS revisions is not whether social work education should pursue justice-oriented aims (it should), but how accreditation standards can advance those aims while preserving the epistemic pluralism, open inquiry, and constructive disagreement that allow professional knowledge and practice to remain self-correcting, innovative, and legitimate.

Academic Principles as the Corrective

We believe that the next developmental step in the evolution of the EPAS is to explicitly incorporate epistemic pluralism, open inquiry, and constructive disagreement as core dimensions of professional education. These academic principles can offer a corrective to the type of ideological entrenchment that appears to increasingly characterize social work education—for example, when curricula or professional competencies privilege particular theoretical frameworks while providing limited space for competing perspectives and critical evaluation.

Epistemic pluralism refers to the presence and protection of differing intellectual, political, religious, philosophical, and theoretical perspectives within professional education (Massimi, 2022). It extends the concept of “diversity” beyond demographic diversity to include differences in moral and ethical reasoning, policy preferences, and explanatory frameworks, paradigms, and theories.

Open inquiry denotes the freedom to question prevailing assumptions, critically examine dominant paradigms, and explore alternative interpretations without fear of professional sanction, social ostracism, or academic penalty. Open inquiry is fundamental to scientific progress and ethical deliberation (Reichman, 2021), as well as to the university itself (Butler, 2022). This value is particularly important for safeguarding minority perspectives with little power in the profession.

Constructive disagreement is the practice skill of engaging competing perspectives with rigor and respect (Iversen, 2021). It requires the capacity to articulate opposing viewpoints fairly, identify assumptions embedded therein, and deliberate across differences without resorting to strawman, silencing or coercion. At its highest level, constructive disagreement should cause genuine questioning of one's own views.

These constructs are not foreign to social work. The profession has long emphasized critical thinking, reflexivity, and self-determination. What is new in our proposal is that these dimensions ought to replace the EPAS emphasis on ADEI. To be clear, we do not believe that programs and instructors should stop teaching ADEI if they choose. Rather, we maintain that privileging a particular paradigm is antithetical to the organizing principles of higher education, which, much like the pluralist vision Madison articulates in Federalist No. 10 (1787) for mitigating the risks of political factions, benefits from the coexistence and contestation of multiple perspectives rather than the dominance of a single intellectual bloc. Madison warned that unchecked factions can dominate political life and threaten the common good; similarly, privileging a single paradigm in social work education risks suppressing competing perspectives and undermining the vibrancy, innovation, and legitimacy of the profession.

We contend that decentering ADEI as a predominant organizing ideology within social work education, instead of privileging it, and strengthening long-held academic principles within the 2029 EPAS would not dilute the profession's commitments to justice. Rather, it would deepen and stabilize these commitments by ensuring that social work education remains open, self-reflective, and intellectually resilient within a complex and fluid social environment. Explicitly fostering pluralism and constructive disagreement equips social work students to engage ethically and critically across ideological divides without enforcing conformity. The risk, of course, is that privileging any single ideology can lead to the silencing of dissenting voices, particularly those of minority factions (Madison, 1787). We must therefore guard against replicating this pattern by excluding or dismissing competing perspectives, lest we evolve into the very authoritarian force we aim to oppose (Popper, 1945).

To summarize, we are concerned with the profession's current accreditation trajectory, particularly its prioritization of a single paradigm to shape what is understood as competent social work practice. We believe the corrective lies not in adding further pedagogical directives to the 2029 EPAS, but in reducing them so that programs and instructors retain the academic freedom necessary to broaden the range of theoretical paradigms utilized in social work education, research, and practice. Rather than privileging any one framework, we advocate for a diverse intellectual environment in which faculty and programs are encouraged to engage multiple perspectives. The following blueprint offers several suggestions towards that end.

Charting a Course Forward: A Working Blueprint for the 2029 EPAS

To help facilitate the vitality and legitimacy of the social work profession, the 2029 EPAS might anchor professional education in the three interrelated academic principles defined above: epistemic pluralism, open inquiry, and constructive disagreement. These principles could be explicitly operationalized in the standards:

Epistemic pluralism. Programs must teach a range of theoretical, philosophical, and methodological approaches—including perhaps, but not limited to critical/antioppressive theories, liberal rights frameworks, capabilities approaches, and empirically driven policy models—so that students can judge and apply frameworks appropriate to diverse practice problems.

Open inquiry. Faculty and students must have institutional protections to raise, investigate, and critique prevailing assumptions without fear of sanction for legitimate scholarly debate. These policies should specifically protect individuals who hold minority viewpoints in educational settings.

Constructive disagreement. Students must learn and be assessed on the skills necessary to engage respectfully with competing perspectives. These skills may include, but are not limited to, demonstrating the capacity to (a) charitably represent opposing views, (b) rebut arguments using evidence and reason, and (c) make ethical decisions when consensus is absent.

As expressed previously, this approach does not preclude the incorporation of ADEI in social work education. Rather it situates it within a family of frameworks as one interpretive paradigm among several approaches. It increases the theoretical perspectives in the profession's educational discourse. It adds to the number of conceptual tools available to understand and address problems.

Based on these principles, we offer the following potential revisions to the 2029 EPAS. We intend for these suggestions to serve as a starting point for further conversation and consultation with social workers from a diverse array of theoretical traditions:

Mission statements. Require programs to include a commitment to diverse perspectives and open inquiry. The mission language should be reflected in explicit and implicit curriculum, hiring practices, and community engagement.

Curriculum requirements. Require syllabi for core courses to demonstrate comparative treatment of competing frameworks. Course assignments should require students to provide rationales for chosen interventions, in light of alternative frameworks.

Research and empiricism. Grounded in widely recognized epistemological principles, research and empiricism in social work education should embrace methodological pluralism. Programs should teach quantitative and falsifiable methods alongside qualitative and critical approaches, with explicit attention to the strengths and limitations of each method and the standards by which evidentiary claims are tested, evaluated, and revised.

Implicit curriculum and governance. Require programs to adopt and actively enforce written policies that protect legitimate dissent and guard against ideological bias in faculty hiring and student review, recognizing that existing guidelines are often insufficient in practice. Require search committees to document concrete efforts to recruit faculty who hold diverse intellectual perspectives, helping to ensure that multiple approaches are genuinely represented among faculties.

Gatekeeping and adjudication. Anchor remediation and dismissal decisions in demonstrable violations of professional competence or NASW ethical standards alone. Establish transparent due process protections that differentiate unprofessional conduct from scholarly or moral disagreement.

Practicum. Ensure practicum courses address worldview tensions encountered in agencies. Practicum supervisors should be trained to assess students on evidence-informed reasoning, ethical practice, and client outcomes.

Student assessment. Introduce Student Learning Outcomes (SLO) on pluralism. These outcomes could be situated within Competency 1: Demonstrate Ethical and Professional Behavior. They might include students’ capacity to (a) apply competing theoretical frameworks, (b) justify an intervention using evidence and ethical reasoning, and (c) respond constructively to critique.

Conclusion

A core task of accreditation is to define what counts as competent social work practice (Zuchowski, 2024). Competence in a democratic, pluralistic society requires the ability to reason across various types of disagreement, to select and defend interventions on empirical and ethical grounds, and to revise one's judgments informed by evidence and argument. By embedding epistemic pluralism, open inquiry, and constructive disagreement into the 2029 EPAS, CSWE will strengthen the profession's capacity to pursue justice responsibly, sustain public trust, and prepare graduates who are equipped to work with the increasingly diverse populations that characterize American society.