| Credits: | 3 |
|---|---|
| Prerequisites: | None |
| Faculty Approval Date: | 12/06/2007 |
This course is designed to give students a foundation in the awareness, knowledge, understanding, and skills needed to effectively carry out multicultural social work practice with populations who are culturally diverse in terms of the key diversity dimensions such as "ability, age, class, color, culture, ethnicity, family structure, gender (including gender identity and gender expression), marital status, national origin, race, religion or spirituality, sex, and sexual orientation". In particular, students will gain skills in facilitating multicultural group interactions and in resolving conflicts or resistance that may emerge due to cultural misunderstandings or oppressive dynamics. The topics of this course include social identity group development; prejudice and stereotyping and their effects on groups; difference and dominance and the nature of social oppression; our personal and interpersonal connections to power, privilege, and oppression; understanding and resolving conflicts or resistance; methods of dialoguing and coalition building across differences; and basic group facilitation skills and their applications in multicultural settings.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be better able to:
1. Demonstrate personal dialoguing skills around issues of multiculturalism and oppression. Students will learn how to engage in dialogue with others about cultural diversity and social justice across our differences, using respectful and inquisitive forms of active listening, self-reflection, and critical consciousness. Special attention will be given to learning how to discuss the difficult issues of stereotypes, prejudices, conflicts, and the pain we experience because of oppression when it is most difficult to engage in these discussions.
2. Demonstrate dialogue group facilitation skills. Students will learn how to create a space for respectful dialogue across differences, how to engage students in a process of multicultural learning and dialogue, and how to address group dynamics and processes that enhance or hinder dialogue.
3. Demonstrate knowledge of multiple identities and the diversity within identities. Students will develop a clear understanding of multiple social identities, as well as an understanding of the many ways that our multiple identities intersect to create remarkably diverse identity groups (e.g., being an able-bodied woman of color, a Christian Latino gay male, a disabled white man).
4. Understand the interconnections between forms of oppression. Students will recognize that there is no hierarchy of oppression that supports one form of oppression or serves to perpetuate other forms. Students will also understand how the cumulative effects of multiple forms of oppression can create additional burdens.
5. Understand dynamics of difference and dominance. Students will understand what the dynamics of difference and dominance/oppression are (e.g., systems of inequity and inequality, power and status differences, and relative differences in power/privilege or oppression), and how they impact human functioning and social relations within and across diverse groups. In addition, students will understand how structural differences in society are shaped by historical, psychological, social, and political factors.
6. Demonstrate skills for multicultural social work practice, including respect and validation of others' experiences and perspectives, critical consciousness of oppressive socializations and awareness of one's own biases, recognizing our personal role in oppression, and learning how to interrupt oppression and work for social justice through alliance and coalition building across differences.
7. Develop critical consciousness and understand its implications for social work practice. Gain awareness of how the beliefs, feelings, and behaviors that emerge from our multiple identities (and their corresponding experience with dominance or oppression) enhance or hinder our abilities to work with diverse and disenfranchised groups. Students will also become more aware of the oppressive assumptions, biases, and prejudices that they hold towards other groups or their own group (internalized oppression), and how these influence their interactions with others, through conscious and unconscious beliefs, assumptions, emotions and behaviors.
8. Recognize that this learning is continuous. Develop methods for continuing this life long process of recognizing our biases, learning how to change our oppressive behaviors, and building a more socially just multicultural society.
In addition, readings, journal writing, self reflection assignments, and consultations with the instructor, students will be expected to create for dialogue participants. This class will strive to foster a learning environment where each student can reflect critically on their beliefs and perspectives and where their multiple perspectives can be understood, respected, and critically examined. Facilitation training in this course will involve participation in dialogue-like exercises during class and practice sessions in facilitation skills.
University of Michigan
School of Social Work
1080 South University Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106