‘Doing diversity’ in a social work context: reflecting on the use of critical reflection in social work education in an Australian University

There is abundant literature that teaches social work graduates to be culturally competent and critically reflective on issues of cultural diversity. However, it is evident that many competency based approaches do not effectively address issues of privilege, power and diversity. Such approaches can fail to challenge entrenched and/or unconscious biases concerning other cultures. This paper argues we need to move away from over-prioritizing the teaching and use of competency based models for dealing with diversity in disciplines such as Social Work. Using Sara Ahmed’s work on diversity and critical reflection, we present the findings from a survey of social work students. The positive news is that students’ reflections in critical essays and their responses to the learnings they achieved from a unit on race, suggested they were becoming more aware of how privilege and power worked in everyday interactions as well as professional interactions. The other side of the coin was their understanding of the social, political and ethical grounding of values was limited. Students tended to focus more on declaring their allegiance to social work values of ‘honesty, integrity or social justice’ to the point they were mere declarations or saying which become substitutes for actions. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group