Reflections on Empowerment-Based Practice

Social work education presents students with theories for understanding human beings and the social-historical contexts they share. These assumptions are supposed to make social workers' roles, practices, and agencies make sense. But where do they come from? How are the theories selected--and from among what alternatives? The people or licensing bodies choosing or approving these options control knowledge and inhibit knowing beyond the parameters of what they have designated for social work's knowledge base. What were the knowledge requirements or factors used to select prevailing theories about human behavior and the social environment or about social work practice? What happens to practitioners when feelings about their work contradicts what they were taught they should be thinking? This article is a reflection of formal social work learning interacting with the author's own social work experience. The article discusses what receiving knowledge (as opposed to sharing in producing or generating it) means for a practice supposedly committed to the social work values of human dignity and social justice. The experiences that led to the author's work on empowerment-based practice are presented and discussed. These experiences precipitated critical questioning that continues today. Key words: clinical social work; empowerment; epistemology; knowledge building; social justice A cross the protective, large desk sat Michael, a very angry black teenager. One of 25 kids assigned to me, Michael was very bright, articulate, and streetwise. He was 17 and an involuntary participant in our agency's joint project with the country juvenile court. I was 24, white, recently married, middle class, and the proud possesor of a quite new MSW. Like all the other kids I saw while working on this project, Michael was identified as a habitual juvenile offender. He was a mandatory referral to the agency where I was a caseworker. I had seen Michael in weekly court-ordered appointments over several months, with my major contribution being the routine attribution of anger to him-between numerous "hmms" and near obsessive loading, smoking, and reloading of a pipe (it was 1964, and some of us smoked in those days). On this particular day, after another of my seemingly incessant "insightful" (or inciteful?) references to his barely repressed anger (which I had learned was directly and unilaterally related to his early childhood and associated with his unrepressed delinquent behavior patterns), he emphatically said (in edited form), "You know the worst part of you? You really think you care about me!" For some reason I still cannot fully understand, Michael's statement contained a truth and a power that startled me. Michael's anger did not startle me; I was used to it. I had learned that such expressions were not personal, and to distance myself from them. Furthermore, I believed I had some control over this anger because I could interpret its meaning. This power to name another person's experience was built into my recently acquired role, status, and practice model. I did not realize at the time how central these "facts" of professional life were to my identity. Simply put, an epiphany occurred in that moment. In some noncognitive way of "knowing," I knew that Michael was right. I also knew, in the same elusive epistemology, that Michael's truth was not discrete, not separated from mine. In his truth there was a terse, cryptic, yet valid critique of my newly chosen profession, my graduate education, its practice models and its supporting theories--the whole thing. (The italicized words are meant to indicate that the typical cognitive or conceptual meanings associated with them were not what I experienced.) Yet, I knew this truth in the moment, without any cognitive, emotional, or professional support for my knowing it. I knew a truth without a method of knowing that could not be perceived by legitimated ways of perceiving it within my role and identity. …