Dialogic Pedagogy as a Framework for Anti-Racist Social Work Education

Social work education is at a crossroads with the release of the 2022 Educational Policy Administration Standards (EPAS, 2022), which emphasize anti-racist practice. To teach anti-racist social work one must be prepared to use anti-racist pedagogical practices and be supported to do so institutionally. Freire (2020) proposes that education be a tool of liberation through the use of dialogue and attention to power dynamics. To this end, instructional making about the use of dialogue can help create liberatory classrooms. The concept of dialogic pedagogy (Alexander, 2018; Alexander, 2020) is used in education to support the development of language and critical thinking in students. Although it has yet to be applied extensively to higher education and the social work classroom, dialogic pedagogy has clear connections to social work and the potential to better prepare students for anti-racist practice. In a dialogic classroom, language between students and instructors is carefully attended to based on the following principles; purpose, cumulation, support, collectivity, deliberation, and reciprocality (Alexander, 2018; Alexander, 2020). This paper describes and endorses dialogic pedagogy as a framework to support anti-racist social work pedagogy and discusses the implementation of this framework in terms of faculty support and training.