Читать книгу The Sage Handbook of Social Constructionist Practice - Группа авторов - Страница 167

The premise of the negotiation of meaning is one that resonates strongly within the social justice history of social work. All forms of social work practice are built on the values of challenging oppression and empowering clients (NASW Code of ethics, 2017). From a social constructionist perspective, challenging meanings and how those meanings were constructed, including who may benefit and not benefit from the construction of those meanings may assist clients to free themselves from dogmatic and harmful ways of understanding and being (Hare-Mustin, 1994). For a discussion of social constructionism and the NASW Code of Ethics please see Witkin (2000). Oppression may be seen in this light as a co-opting of truth, a monopolizing of meaning that marginalizes alternatives to that truth, and a subsequent recruitment of others into this mono-truth. Common social justice areas from social work practice include gender, race, nationality, economic, and sexual discourses.

Social constructionist informed practice seeks to explore and make visible the ways in which significant meanings in clients’ lives have been constructed and maintained. Such dialogue may include who participates in the construction, the benefits and harms to the client and others, and the possibility of creating new meanings that would be more liberating. Often clients may not realize that they are living their lives by ideas that they have received and then internalized. By breaking these ideas down and making them visible there is an expansion of definitional space for clients to begin to collaboratively co-construct new ways of being. At the macro level social workers assist in organizing groups to challenge and change social discourse and policy that may be oppressive in the lives of clients. The discourse of failed parenting is one example in which client negative beliefs are often internalized and treated at the micro level. Macro social work unpacks the idea of parenting to include a recognition of oppressive social practices such as the unlivable minimum wage, lack of affordable childcare, discriminatory hiring practices, underfunded neighborhood schools, and other forms of oppression. Macro social workers advocate with their clients for policy and discourse change while also deconstructing internalized beliefs to create definitional space for the development of preferred identities.

With the recognition that language and meaning are negotiated, the social constructionist informed social worker may also view models of practice as cultural language constructions. Models of practice have specific theories that guide them (e.g., cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic) and these theories have language systems with words created specific to these approaches (e.g., automatic thoughts, conditioning, Id, Ego). With the realization that models of practice are constructed languages of meaning and that language and meaning are negotiated, social workers and clients can openly decide if they would like to collaboratively use a model of constructed language to understand problems and solutions, if they would like to combine them, change them, or not use them at all.