Critical social work pedagogy

Abbie develops curriculum and teaches MSW level courses focused on training practitioners in a healing and disability justice framework integrating healing and social change.

Therapy as Community Organizing
Augsburg University Clinical Social Work Elective
Syllabus written by Abbie Shain MSW LICSW
Taught Summer 2022
In this class, we will explore various intersections of self and community as we work to untangle, tangle, and reimagine healing as a collective project. This class will use disability justice and healing justice frameworks, media sources, and participants’ lived experiences and social locations as course texts. Together we will seek to honor and lift up the necessary reciprocity of relationships for care workers to contribute to healing and for healing to contribute to social change. This course includes interdisciplinary consultation and collaboration, self as therapist work, and exploring and addressing issues of race and class in the context.

Diversity and Inequality I
Augsburg University Core Curriculum
Syllabus written by Dr. Erin Sugrue MSW LICSW
Taught Fall 2022
This course is the first in a two-course sequence. During this semester, students will learn about various forms of oppression and participate in an inter- or intra-group dialogue group (IGD). IGD is a stage-based, facilitated, face-to-face group that focuses on dialogue skills within the context of one’s race, ethnicity, age, religion, disability, country of origin, gender identity and sexual orientation. In the second semester, individual self-reflection and basic understandings of oppression and discrimination to more deeply interrogate institutions of social control and the social work profession’s participation in these systems.

The two-sequence course is based on the assumption that social injustice occurs and is present at individual, institutional, and societal/structural levels; and, professional social work ethics and values demand anti-racist and anti-oppressive practice at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels.

Diversity and Inequality II
Augsburg University Core Curriculum
Syllabus written by Dr. Erin Sugrue MSW LICSW
Teaching Spring 2023

This is the second semester of a two-sequence course on “diversity & inequality.” The focus of the first semester course was on understanding various forms of oppression and -isms that operate throughout U.S. society, while simultaneously exploring one’s own social identities and how these identities shape individual and collective experience within this social context. The second semester moves beyond individual self-reflection and basic understandings of oppression and discrimination to more deeply interrogate institutions of social control and the social work profession’s participation in these systems. We will examine the criminal legal system, the child welfare system, and the U.S. immigration system and their roots in ideologies of punishment, domination, separation and isolation, which have helped to reproduce and maintain racial & economic inequality and oppression. In addition to engaging in a critique of these systems and social work’s participation in them, we will also use abolitionist frameworks and models of futurist thinking to explore possibilities for radical and transformative social, political, and economic changes.

*This course borrows heavily from a syllabus created by Cameron Rasmussen at the City University of New York, Abolition & Social Work: Theory & Practice and a syllabus created by Dr. Sophia Sarantakos at the University of Denver, Creating New Anchors: An Introduction to Prison-Industrial Complex Abolition. All material and ideas used with permission. 

Treatment of Trauma
University of Minnesota School of Social Work elective
Syllabus written by Angie Lewis-Dmello MSW LICSW
Teaching Spring 2023

This course provides an overview of the treatment of trauma in diverse populations. The course begins by reviewing the developmental consequences of childhood trauma as background for understanding the treatment of Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorders in adulthood. It reviews current assessment and diagnostic challenges and practices with diverse populations. The course presents evidence-based psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral approaches to case conceptualization and treatment planning across several populations of trauma survivors. Students will gain practice in interviewing and assessment, interventions for acute stress reactions, interventions for the treatment of single incident and complex trauma, and knowledge about working with special populations. Students will learn about the use of self in treatment, the impact of secondary trauma on therapists and strategies for self-care. The course will discuss ecological models for addressing trauma on individual, family, group and community levels through applications to diverse populations including survivors of mass disasters, childhood abuse and domestic violence as well as veterans, refugees and torture survivors.

Social Work and Difference, Diversity, and Privilege
University of Minnesota School of Social Work core curriculum
Lead Instructor: Dr. Saida M. Abdi, Ph.D., LICSW
Teaching Spring 2023

This course is specifically focused on issues of anti-racism, anti-oppressive and decolonizing practices, and diversity issues in social work practice. An understanding of diversity and difference, power and privilege, and oppression and intersectionality - as well as an understanding of oneself within these systems - is an essential foundation for developing culturally competent and social justice oriented social work practice. Thus, this course is designed to teach students about (a) the systems which maintain differential access to power and privilege at the expense of marginalization, (b) skills for understanding and interrogating their own multiple social identities (i.e. social locations) and intersectionality, (c) knowledge and skills for competent social work practice, taking into account student and client social locations, and (d) strategies for interrupting systems of oppression and other ways to work for the core social work value of social justice. 

Major course topics include bias and xenophobia (including one’s own), systems of power and privilege, historically oppressed groups and the shifting landscape of marginalization, practice theories (e.g., ally models), practice techniques for advanced social work practice across difference (e.g., ethnographic techniques), and strategies for addressing injustice in the context of advanced social work practice. The themes of deconstructing systems of oppression, cultural wellness, intersectionality, and practice strategies are infused through the course.