“Socially responsible practitioners work to understand and ensure community health, rather than simply providing individuals without recognition that ongoing socially bound environmental factors must also be addressed. They consider their own history of understanding oppression, their initial resistance, and the lessons learned from anti-oppression and anti-racist work.”
A Movement for Justice, Adler University
Socially responsible practice is the central Adlerian approach to achieving social justice. At Adler University, the mission is to graduate socially responsible practitioners, and this is accomplished through instruction, collective reflection, skill development, and activism for social justice. The Socially Responsible Practitioner Checklist is a tool that supports the integration of social justice principles and practices in the course design process. The checklist represents a set of standards applied in the designing of robust learning experiences that transform students into change agents.
1. Learn about and engage with a diversity of people
- Recognize perspectives different from their own across race, age, ability, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, military, experience, income, language, and other aspects of diversity.
- Develop collegial and social relationships with people whose social identities are different than their own across race, age, ability, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, military, experience, income, language, and other aspects of diversity.
Questions to Consider:
- How do you prepare your students to use empathy to engage with people that they do not regularly encounter?
- How do you prepare your students to seek out ways to meet people that are not like them?
2. Learn about historical and contemporary inequities
- Access print, digital and community resources that expose unfair treatment, recognizing personal positions of power and privilege and the historical foundation of these.
Questions to Consider:
- What resources (e.g. readings, video, audio, images, etc.) are being used in your course to help strengthen students’ knowledge of historical inequities?
- How do those inequities manifest in our contemporary society?
- Work with others like themselves for support and to address those areas of confusion about their own biases.
- Build alliances with others different from themselves to build coalitions, reflect on their own assumptions, and gain perspective on structures and systems that keep inequality in place.
Questions to Consider:
- How are you preparing your students to reach others that they normally don’t connect with?
- Strive to acknowledge social injustice and avoid blame as an endpoint of one’s efforts.
- Recognize with integrity one’s personal and collective power and control to effect change, neither over nor under-estimating the capacity to act decisively.
Questions to Consider:
- How do you help your students gain the knowledge and skills to include such efforts as work with campaigns, communities or local politicians, run for office or lead a community change effort all under the umbrella of advancing a social justice agenda?
- Recognize one’s own positions of power and privilege, acknowledge the impact of these on their own biases and discriminatory practices, which are often supported by organizational policies and practices that maintain social inequity.
- Acknowledge and address the ways that one manages oppressive systems. Acts of resistance include organizing, action planning, lobbying, fundraising, educating, and transforming their reactive to anger into pro-active determination.
Questions to Consider:
- Have your students reviewed the Cycle of Socialization and the Cycle of Liberation and assessed their own experience of being socialized an oppressive way?
- How have you prepared your students to assess empathy in relation to social justice issues?
- How do you prepare your students to speak out verbally about injustice?
6. Work to restore justice
- Influence and develop policies, structures, practice rules, power sharing, and change leadership that is aligned with social equity.
- Provide personally, meaningful information as social motivators, promoting an equity-focused approach to social change.
- Model behavior that moves us to justice and reinforcing the movement toward justice.
- Support interpersonal and institutional actions to overcome the legacy of injustice which include dialogue to promote understanding, community investments, and development of public policy that addresses barriers to equity and inclusion.
Questions to Consider:
- Have your encouraged your students to join any groups, coalitions, or organizations that are working to restore social justice?
7. Make reparations and reconciliation to those aggrieved
- Provide acknowledgement, responsiveness, and restoration to individuals and populations wronged through individual or collective action or inaction.
- Support a formal apology on the part of nations to the living descendants of these people.
- Support restorative practices which include civil settlements such as direct payments, increased educational opportunities, and government-funded community investments to overcome the legacy effects of these injustices.
Questions to Consider:
- What research do you have your students conduct to understand who is owed reparation?
- How do you prepare your students to assess their allyship of oppressed groups?
- How do you prepare your students to be able to integrate this step into their personal practice?
Resources
Adler University. (n.d.). A movement for justice. https://srp.adler.edu/doc/A_Movement_For_Justice.pdf
Harro, B. (n.d.). Cycle of socialization.
Harro. B. (n.d.). Cycle of liberation.