A Dialogue With Indigenous Experts to Advance Macro Education, Research and Practice

Integrating indigenous perspectives and history into macro education advances the pursuit of environmental and racial justice. This session will apply the 2024 APM call to actively engage in promoting Indigenous knowledge and skill. Through dialogues with experts on native traditions, it will deepen macro methods in the classroom and practicum.

Macro social work is essential to ensure that social, environmental justice and human rights are addressed at the organizational, community, and policIntegrating indigenous perspectives and history into macro education advances the pursuit of environmental and racial justice. This session will apply the 2024 APM call to actively engage in promoting Indigenous knowledge and skill. Through dialogues with experts on native traditions, it will deepen macro methods in the classroom and practicum.y levels. Essential components include the pursuit of anti-oppressive policies and practices in classroom and field found in the Macro Guide produced by us, the Special Commission and published by CSWE (2018).This session will begin to review and suggest updates to its content based on EPAS 2022 (Competencies 2 and 3), and identify strategies for ensuring that these are relevant and connected to macro content (Practice Competencies 6-9).

This session builds on an 11-year-old movement among social work educators, researchers, and practitioners to strengthen macro practice in social work education and endorsed by CSWE, NASW, SSWR and NADD and our macro partners, ISP, ACOSA, & MSWSN. Given the conference theme and the continuing highly charged and divisive times that exist in our country, this SC-led partnership session will begin to review ways to implement and update indigenous perspectives into the macro end of social work curricula. These will be included into the second Specialized Practice Curricular Guide for Macro Social Work Practice as these apply to EPAS 2022. The participants will especially focus on Competencies 2 and 3 (Diversity, Rights, Justice) and Practice Competencies 5-9 which require macro skills, strategies, and solutions.

Participants will identify ways to promote the active engagement of students, faculty, and practitioners in a robust conversation about the tensions between social work ideology and values on one end, and practice with clients, constituents and colleagues on the other end. Information gathered by Special Commission allies and supporters will be provided to the participants in order to continue to increase the number of macro specializations in MSW programs, increase recruitment and retention of macro level social work students, enlarge the pool of macro careers for social workers inside and outside traditional social work settings, and examine ways to rebalance macro and micro content in advanced generalist and BSW programs.
The session will be interactive and involve participants in tackling some of the continuing challenges to the Special Commission agenda to strengthen macro curricula. Examples of these issues include the past and current state of social work licensing and its impact on macro education and practice and the public and even student perception that often begins with “I didn’t know you could do ‘that’ in social work,” where “that” means working at the organizational, community, and policy levels.

References
Anrea & Paul-Rene Tamburro. Macro social work with indigenous peoples. EOMSW 2022
Hilary Weaver. Native Americans: Overview. Encyclopedia of Macro Social Work. 2022.
Laurie Walker & Turquoise Deveraux. Intergenerational Trauma: Indigenous Populations. EOMSW, 2022.
Megan Sage. Culturally Informed services in Tribal communities. EOMSW. 2022.