Reflective Essay – Social Work Identity
Assignment Description
This assignment is designed to demonstrate your reflexive engagement with your social work identity. This draws on your critical reflection skills, your knowledge of social work values such as social justice and your awareness that biographical events shape your world view and identity that you take with you in your social work practice. This assignment asks you to critically reflect on who you are.
There are 2 key tasks:
- Provide a representation of your social work identity: This could be a diagram, photograph, painting, wordcloud or other representation. Guidance: For example, someone could use a photograph of a tree because it grows, like their knowledge about themselves and is grounded by roots that symbolize social work theoretical foundations that keep them steady in their practice. In this section you just need to present the image/ representation of your social work identity. In the second section you will be explaining the representation.
- Provide a reflexive account of your social work identity which includes a critical examination of power, privilege and/or disadvantage. How did you arrive at your social work identity? You can include a concept such as social justice or a social work theory to discuss and relate it to your world view and who you are. Your reflection needs to be aligned to social work values and will explain why you have chosen your particular representation. (1500-2000 words)
Guidance:
We have discussed intersectional identity in this unit. Draw from what you know about yourself and describe how power or oppression has shifted your world view or shaped who you are as a person. Sometimes when students undertake a reflection, they talk about privilege as ‘just being lucky’, for example to grow up with wealth. Think deeper than this—privilege is not accidental, and we know that patterns of inequality persist because certain groups of people are privileged.