Trent University’s Social Work department is committed to upholding the values of ethical social work practice, anti-/decolonization, and the pursuit of social justice.
In addition to these values, we are committed to the pursuit of truth-telling, as the first step toward repair and reconciliation. We therefore acknowledge, in this statement and in our work, that social work in this country was developed on stolen Indigenous land and part of our profession’s heritage is the colonial, white-supremacist nation building project of Canada which included genocide. Social workers and our agencies were complicit and active in perpetrating the Sixties Scoop, and have continued to uphold colonial, racist and other oppressive systems in our work.
In our role as social work educators, and guided by our values, we therefore seek to identify, hold our profession accountable for, teach about, disrupt, and dismantle the harms of colonialism and other forms of systemic oppression, through our teaching, re-search, and other academic work.
On this basis, the social work education offered through our Department prioritizes:
- Inclusion and respect for critical, non-Western, and Indigenous ways of knowing. We acknowledge members of equity-deserving groups as experts on their own lives. We also embrace the importance of including or centering marginalized voices when choosing teaching materials such as course readings;
- Promoting inclusivity and sense of belonging for all students, by striving toward accessible, collaborative and creative problem solving for students with marginalized ways of learning and knowing;
- Critical reflection about power, privilege, oppression, including around Eurocentric epistemologies, systems, beliefs and practices;
- Teaching practice that is consistent with the CASW Code of Ethics, The Truth and Reconciliation Commissions Calls to Action, the Canadian Human Rights Act, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the objectives of the United Nations Decade for People of African Descent;
- Being co-conspirators in efforts to confront and disrupt oppressive systems, by supporting or joining movements for emancipation, self-determination, and sovereignty (“land back”) of oppressed groups wherever possible;
- Teaching theories, modalities, and skills that promote critical social work practice, including critical self-reflection and reflexivity, harm reduction and other collaboration-focused practices, structural and other macro-level social work, and practices that respond to the critiques of intersectionality;
- Continually updating curricula with the most current information and innovative approaches to practice, including topical political, social justice and policy issues, emerging critical modalities, and authors from marginalized communities;
- Supporting staff and instructors from equity-deserving groups, within an institutional setting that has an enduring history of marginalization;
- Supporting Indigenous, racialized, queer, and disabled students as they progress through the program.