精东传媒app

How does social work engage with First Nation鈥檚 peoples and people from diverse cultural backgrounds? This is a question that many social workers must consider. It is important for social workers to understand how race, privilege and cultural blindness affects the assumptions, presumptions and perspectives that guide social work thinking and practice. Australia is one of the most multicultural nations world-wide yet many people with diverse cultural identities are marginalised, disenfranchised, and socially excluded. Multicultural Australia includes First Nation peoples, who have more than 250 different languages. Social workers must embrace and celebrate multicultural Australia given the profession鈥檚 ethical commitment to decolonisation, diversity, human rights, and social justice. Students must adopt inclusive professional practice that respects and values how peoples with diverse cultural backgrounds have different ways of knowing, doing and being. However, critical multicultural practice will also need to strengthen relationships and enhance mutual trusting relationships between First Nations and multicultural communities and social workers.

It is relatively easy to acknowledge that Australia has witnessed a succession of new patterns and waves of migration for more than 100 years; moving from primarily an Anglo-Celtic base to a universal multicultural nation. Migrants from Eastern, Western, and Northern Europe came in the early 20th century, and they were followed by Southern Europeans in the 1950s, followed by migrants from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Changes to immigration policies paved the way for non-European migration, especially from Asia and Southern Africa due to civil wars and humanitarian crises. What this European centric history misses, is that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have inhabited Australia for more than 60,0000 years. Indigenous Australians are the world's oldest living culture and yet social work has often failed to address the fatal impacts of colonisation is the Australian context.

This course explores the need for social workers to critically acknowledge the imperative of decolonisation through challenging cultural oppression, racism, and consequent discrimination. Social workers must explore, analyse, and respect cultural differences in worldviews, as well as contributing to culturally safe practice. In addition to introduction to multicultural theories and practice approaches, this course allows students to critically reflect on 'white' social work and the need for decolonisation. The course also specifically addresses a number of fields of practice where people with diverse cultural identities experience significant challenges including child safety issues; domestic and family violence; homelessness and statelessness; rurality; ethnicity and ageing; transcultural mental health; and disability. Adopting a critical human-rights approach, the course enables student to embrace and engage in anti-oppressive and emancipatory social work practice with individuals, communities and systemic changes to ensure people with diverse cultural backgrounds are welcomed and valued.