CONTEMP SOC ISSUES: ISMS LAB

This course fosters students to challenge bias, prejudice, and forms of discrimination that operate in the lives of social workers and our clients. As a “laboratory,” learning begins with hands-on participation in a series of interactive exercises designed to elicit and deconstruct dynamics of racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, heterocentrism, classism, etc. Each activity is followed by a facilitated exploration and critical analysis of the experiential process. An emphasis is placed on professional and personal insight and skill with regards to culturally/contextually competent practice, processing of charged issues, and use of self. This course is well-suited for students who are authentic, willing to take risks, and committed to becoming effective agents of change towards social justice. 

This course is conceived to assist social work practitioners identify and examine the ways various populations experience oppression and discrimination, with an eye towards the various dimensions that shape how “-isms” occur in our lives and society, including but not limited to:

• Societal levels: personal, institutional, cultural
• Visibility: overt, covert
• Temporal: historical, periodic/occasional, everyday/ongoing
• Actor: me, us, them
• Dynamics of invalidation/forms of denial