Incorporating Diversity and Inclusion into Trauma-Informed Social Work

Transformational Leadership

Laura Quiros

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000296099
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychotherapeutische Beratung

Incorporating Diversity and Inclusion into Trauma-Informed Social Work incorporates discussions of leadership, racism and oppression into a new understanding of how trauma and traumatic experience play out in leadership and organizational cultures.

Chapters unpack ideas about the intersections of self, trauma and leadership, bridging the personal and professional, and illustrating the relationship between employees and leaders. Discussion questions and reflections at the end of each chapter offer the opportunity for the reader to understand their own vulnerabilities in relation to the subject matter. This book reconceptualizes cultural competency, trauma and leadership in the context of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and views theories and practices through a lens of diversity and inclusivity.

Incorporating Diversity and Inclusion into Trauma-Informed Social Work is an expansive guide for students in social work, one that explores and explains how trauma and difference manifest in how we communicate, lead and work with each other.

1
LIVED EXPERIENCE AS A TEACHING TOOL FOR DISRUPTION OF MY LENS

I vividly remember sitting in my Masters in Social Work program's human behavior course in the late 1990s. The professor was a South Asian tenured female and every human behavior theory she taught was created by a white man. I remember sitting there questioning this monolithic representation of human behavior that seemed unrelatable and inauthentic. At the same time, I recall feeling nervous to raise my hand and question her teachings. Despite the fact that critical and creative thinking were explicit learning objectives, I stayed silent due to a fear of questioning and disrupting the theoretical frameworks of white men. Not only would I have been questioning the frameworks of these white males, but by extension, that of a non-white male who was seemingly co-signing the validity of these theories. Instead what surfaced were familiar feelings of exclusion and self-doubt. My trajectory peppered with traumatic experiences and a biracial and multiethnic identity was not aligned with Erik Erikson's static states of human development. Yet, if this was the normative way of being, then how could I have the audacity to disrupt that space? After all, I was permitted entrance into this intellectual community; didn't I have to follow the normative ways of being? Student engagement does not necessarily mean curiosity is welcomed, nor was disruption of the established status quo encouraged. More so, advancement of the status quo through new inquiries was what was always expected, and discussed with most excitement.

Locating Myself

Now as a professor of social work, I start my classes with the mindset of giving students the encouragement and agency to question my teachings and my pedagogy. Permission to be curious to question is a practice in my pedagogy that is somewhat counter to what students are used to in higher education. Starting with an understanding of and engagement with their own positionalities, they interact with the theories in very diverse and nuanced ways. Essentially, I ask students to locate themselves, which means answering questions in small groups about their families of origins, their traditions, their communities, their ways of knowing and ways of learning. This practice principle of locating the self is a trauma-informed approach that incorporates the diversity and inclusion of experience into the classroom setting. Explicitly naming curiosity as a skill to be honored while locating oneself sets the foundation for our work individually and as a classroom community. This approach also is a parallel process to students' work with clients. Examples from my recent teaching in a social work research and practice doctoral course include a white and Catholic identified heterosexual female doctoral student sharing that in all her years of education, which included both a Masters in Social Work and a Law Degree, she never had a professor ask her to bring her whole self into the classroom and engage with the theories through the lens of her positionality. Similarly, a Chinese identified woman in my class during the COVID-19 pandemic, was fraught with anxiety about her family in China and remained consumed with the dangers of the COVID-19. In this particular class, and in all my classes that I teach, the students and I spend the first class of every semester digging into this practice of self-location, and then I spend the first 10 minutes of every subsequent class allowing students to situate themselves and bring their outside lives into the classroom as part of the preparation to then learn about, question and interrogate the lessons for the day. Through this intentional and engaged pedagogy (hooks, 2010) of the self in context, we see the impact of diversity in our learning and different interpretations of theoretical frameworks. This practice innately builds community as the students share narratives of their lived experiences in the context of questioning theoretical frameworks. Classrooms become brave spaces to dialogue, empathically hold each other accountable, and positively disrupt. As a professor, this beginning exercise of locating the self is trauma-informed because of how I use myself as the instructor in the space of collaboration with the students. I share my story as they share theirs. We begin the process of developing safety within the classroom by shared vulnerability and students feel an increased sense of empowerment through the use of curiosity. Trustworthiness emerges as my pedagogy remains consistent, helping to (hopefully) diminish any felt precarity as I honor their courage for sharing and questioning. This type of leadership in the classroom allows me to be in tune with the range of potential trauma students may be experiencing outside of our classroom and how that trauma impacts the learning and my teaching. This was not the case in my personal experience as a student, the majority of my classrooms were not trauma-informed nor were they taught from an intentional pedagogical approach of inclusivity or diversity of experiences. I was not encouraged to interrogate the teachings through the lens of my nuanced positionality or my present life experiences, and I witness in my own experience with my colleagues in higher education, that this is not a normative practice in classrooms today. There is more often a disconnect between the personal life of the professor, the student and the class material. Safety is assumed, not developed or nurtured, and shared vulnerability is not practiced or valued. And yet, I would argue that the social work classroom must become another brave space of positive disruption in the effort toward the social work mission of social justice, including the sincere integration of inclusion, diversity and trauma-informed practice. I hold this quote by bell hooks close to my teaching social work practice, “classrooms cannot change if professors are unwilling to admit that to teach without biases requires that most of us learn anew, that we become students again” (hooks, 2010, p. 31). As social work educators, driven by a social justice mission, I believe there is a responsibility to model a practice of trauma-informed leadership, that is both diverse and inclusive, in the classroom and part of that practice has to hold the instructor as well as the students empathically accountable to upholding that mission.

Returning to my experience during the human behavior class in my Masters' program, I cannot remember how long I sat with those feelings of exclusion but I do know that enough of those feelings surfaced to feel that I needed to take action. My first action step was diving into literature that spoke to my experience of nuance, complexity and simultaneously building a community of solidarity. I took ownership of my education in the form of forced critical engagement and began exploring. I met women who also had biracial and multiethnic backgrounds and immersed myself in the teachings of bell hooks and Paulo Freire; two educators driven to teach by an act of love, love of humanity, inclusion and diversity. I found an intersection between the exclusion of my experiences and the teachings of those who focused on engaged pedagogy grounded in the theoretical framework of connection, belonging and love. “In Freire's world, to be passionate and to love in the midst of all our fears, anxieties, and imperfections truly constituted powerful expressions of our humanity – the humanity we had courageously embrace as educators committed to the practice of freedom,” (Darder, 2002, p. 40). I interpret this quote to mean, freedom from our own, often times traumatic, narratives in order to sincerely enter into the lives of others, such as students and clients. As a social work educator, I am in a constant state of readjustment because I bend my knowledge to the lives of my students in the classroom and teach not as an expert, but as a guide and a learner. I am grounded in my own narrative but not in reverence to it. The literature of critical educators, many of whom I reference throughout this book, served as a way to normalize my experiences outside of the dominate discourses being taught and also as a way to approach my family and the world from a healing place of love. I have always been led by my heart and in some instances, this was not the most balanced way and at the same time, it was the only way I know to both work and heal.

In thinking through the importance of teaching social work students to honor curiosity and adopt a critical analysis, I am reminded of a Black female doctoral student I am advising. During the preparation of her dissertation proposal, we had a conversation about her dissertation which focuses on the lived experiences of Black social work supervisors within the supervisory relationship. Upon review, she discovered many gaps in the supervisory literature including a dearth of information related specifically to the experience of Black social work supervisors within the supervisory relationship. When it came to the part of the literature review that required her to take a critical look at the social work profession, and specifically supervision, her response to me was, “who am I to critique this profession?” Despite the fact that as a Black woman supervisor herself, she was able to recall countless examples of exclusion from the very same professionals who also occupied a supervisory role. Even as someone who has chosen to spend significant time and money uplifting the voices of Black social work supervisors by obtaining her PhD, she remained disconnected from the literature and her lived experience, as if her lived experience had to fit into the dominant discourse. To leave out her lived experiences of exclusion would be to flatten her experiences, minimize the impact of the racism she experienced, and uphold the white and normative status quo. Social workers must notice the moments when we can shift our clinical lens to see something deeper and more complex than the picture that is being presented. For me it was a feeling, a visceral response to the traditional social work material that was being taught and the lack of space to dialogue in a sincere way about who and what is being excluded from the discourse, despite the social justice mandate of the profession.

I feel it today. I now look to my physical reactions as signs of the trauma of exclusion as well as when I need to positively disrupt a conversation, be it a classroom discussion, faculty meeting, a committee meeting or a coaching session with a CEO. My palms begin to sweat, my stomach turns and I start to physically shift in my seat. I watch and listen to my body (Menakem, 2017). These physical reactions, perhaps post-trauma reactions, are the manifestation of felt trauma of entering a space that feels exclusive and invalidating. The felt fear of speaking up, claiming my voice and space in the conversation. These reactions happen less in individual coaching sessions, especially when I am working with Black people and people of color. They happen more in the predominantly white university space. At the same time, I use these physical reactions as signs of the intentional mindfulness that is required for positive disruption. The disruption eases the physical manifestations of trauma. It is in fact a mind, body and spiritual experience. These are the moments when I feel my body in alignment with my mind. I enter dialogues with courage and vulnerability without expectation because I also know I could be put back in the box or even worse, dismissed. In many ways, entering that space is healing because once I speak and share, the physical manifestations of previous traumas subside, at least for that moment.

Social workers, our lens has great potential to evolve. Think about your purpose for obtaining a Masters in Social Work. What brought you to the social work field and what is the lens from which you view the social work profession from? I'd like for you to take a few moments to answer those questions, whether it be in the margins or through a different mode. The next part of this chapter is devoted to defining the terms like leadership, trauma, diversity and inclusion through the lens of the dominant discourse. We have begun to find points of contention, disruption in an effort to introduce nuance, ambivalence and ultimately upset the status quo.

Disrupting Common Definitions

Cultural Competency

Traditional definitions of cultural competency define this concept and practice model as a static state, as something that is achievable. Social work has struggled, and continues to do so, with implementing institutional and systemic analyses of racism, whiteness, and racial power within its practice, education, and research settings. This is despite the fact that one of the distinguishing features of social work is its focus on the environment (Quiros, Varghese, & Vanidestine, 2020). The mandate within the social service world is social justice. Yet, because social justice is often framed within the context of “cultural competency” and thus is focused on categories of culture and ethnicity, it leads to implicitly endorsing a color-blind framework by de-emphasizing the significance of “race”, racism, and conflating identity (Abrams & Moio, 2009; Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Schiele, 2007; Yee, 2005). For example, social workers who rely on the cultural competency model to understand “race” may focus at the micro level to understand how people are “culturally different” in lieu of understanding how categories of race result in differential social power (Varghese, 2016). A critical observer must ask, “different from whom?” In most cases, the answer is people identified as white, who are often “unmarked” or not “raced” yet receive unearned social, economic and psychological advantages in the racial hierarchy in the United States. As a graduate student I vividly remember those paragraphs titled “African Americans,” “Latinos,” and “Asians,” that were required reading meant to fulfill the culturally competence mandate of the profession. Somehow it was expected that reading what are conflated notions of stereotyped identities and memorizing a set of academic and interpersonal skills would equip students with the skills needed to work with non-white populations. As a woman of color and budding social worker reading these passages, I recall all the questions I had. The questions ranged from self-doubt, because there was never a passage on being biracial or bicultural, to confusion because I knew that the Black Diaspora was more than just the African American experience. African American is not synonymous with Black, just as I was familiar with the diversity and nuance within the Latinx culture.

Understanding “white culture,” white ideology and the social power manifested in whiteness are not usually examined within the context of cultural competency (Quiros, Varghese, & Vanidestine, 2020). Furthermore, discussions solely focused on “race” and racism often imply relevance exclusively to Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) while excluding an analysis of whiteness. This can narrowly frame BIPOC as the primary location for challenging racial injustices without questioning the dominant white ideology that created the racism and continues to underpin and perpetuate the racism and trauma experienced by BIPOC within universities and organizations today. BIPOC is an acronym that stands for Black, Indigenous, people of color that was crafted in 2013 but became more prevalent and popularized on the internet in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. Positively disrupting the notion of “cultural competence” is required to bridge the gap between micro and macro practice and to look more deeply and properly at trauma, inclusion and diversity within the field of social work. This disruption is necessary to help students in the very beginning of their education engage in a more nuanced and critical understanding and analysis of the trauma of the institutionalized racial hierarchy within the United States. This should be embedded throughout the social work curriculum and integrated into field education. Without doing so, social work students remain ill equipped to engage in critical discussions about race and whiteness in the classroom and in their work with clients, groups and communities.

Positive Disruption: Example from a Colleague in the Classroom

A white and cisgender male colleague of mine has spent his career understanding and interrogating his whiteness. His name is Dr. Todd Vanidestine. We worked together at Adelphi University, facilitated classroom dialogues and delivered several trainings on Whiteness. In trainings, we co-facilitate and use our identities as a model for social work practice, specifically engaging across race and gender differences. It is always so interesting to see how participants respond to us based on our identities. For example, he is usually the one to be referre...