Decolonizing Clinical Social Work Practice

This course will support students in critically examining current theories and practices in the field of clinical social work. Students will engage varying learning resources including lecture, discussion, multimedia and their own ancestral and intuitive wisdom in an effort to unpack assumptions that are embedded within the constructed phases of treatment ( i.e assessment, intervention and termination). Through this course, students will move towards a holistic approach to care that honors more complex, non-linear, and culturally rooted healing traditions. As a result, students will leave the course having interrogated their own socio-cultural positionality as it relates to their clinical social work practice, alongside critiquing and analyzing the Western structures of social work from an indigenous and Global Majority-inflected lens.