By Dr Nicholas Aribino
The field of Social Work is said to be practice based, yet it shies away from neighbouring disciplines like community psychology, education, disability studies and special needs education in terms of brain circulation and exchanging of notes. The practicality of Social Work cannot be defined to the hilt without an appreciation of the mutuality of areas that intercut with social work and the social environments in which social workers operate. In their day-to-day work, social workers are bound to interact with vulnerable populations like people with diverse requirements who may be Deaf, emotionally, socially and behaviourally challenged, visually impaired, street children and intellectually challenged people. Given this array of clientele, Social Work programming should be designed and planned in a way that is accommodative of neighbouring disciplines cited above. In my experience as a lecturer in institutions of higher learning I have witnessed an attitude of high-handedness from professional colleagues in the domain of Social Work, an attitude of access and treatment discrimination against professional colleagues from other disciplines. It is this attitude that this opinion piece would like to address and, in the process, educate those in the field of Social Work that although they may be in the picture, they may not constitute the entire picture.
The world does not operate on operational silos; systems that make the world go round are mutually constitutive and reinforcing. Similarly, no discipline can tell an entire story about epistemologies and phenomena on its own without boundary spanning or connective work. All disciplines that relate to understanding human nature, people’s lived struggles and experiences are interwoven and need to work synergistically to cotton on the entire picture of humanity. To that effect, hybrid dynamics would be better placed to understand epistemic values that constitute several different cultural groups of people. In that respect, I have assessed the curricula for Social Work in the Zimbabwean universities, and they are eerily silent on Deaf Culture and Sign Language. How can a social work graduate be competent in a Deaf Community when he or she is not conversant with signed communication?
The social work programme in higher institutions in Zimbabwe should be redesigned to reflect ecological demands. According to the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) statistics hearing disability in Zimbabwe ranges from 4-6% of the general population. Approximately, 520 000 to 780 000 people in Zimbabwe are hearing impaired. Arguably, a social worker in Zimbabwe is bound to work with Deaf children and adults who have experienced sexual molestation, who may need counselling, judicial services, medical attention, empathetic listening and informational justice. Pursuant to the above polemic, one is bound to ask a 64-million-dollar question: How then can a social worker in Zimbabwe be effective in ensuring that there is social justice for citizens who are multiply minoritised in a scenario like the one cited above? The education and training for would-be social workers should have as part of its content, conceptual and practical understandings of the Deaf Culture and Sign Language in Zimbabwe. Let a social worker be conversant with Sign Language because it is both the lingua franca and the source language for Deaf people. If universities in Zimbabwe are teaching Mandarin, English, Portuguese and Germany, among other foreign languages, why can’t they approach Sign Language in a similar vein. Pluriversity is the way to go and disciplines such as Social Work should as much as possible think global but act local at the same time. Let there be a synergy within and across disciplines in universities, social work will benefit immensely from working with neighbouring disciplines in areas where it has shortcomings. For example, those in disability studies can offer practical lessons to social work on Sign Language and the Deaf Culture, and impairment specific organisations (Deaf Zimbabwe) can also provide technical and conceptual knowledge on how to converse with deaf students in general and deaf people in particular.
A discipline that comprises experts is bound to go the way of the dodo, it is only the discipline that approaches knowledge as fluid that has the capacity to be versatile, grow and expand. Experts don’t grow because they erroneously think that they have arrived, yet those who have the beginner’s mindset learn, grow and expand daily because they understand that knowledge is not a native of any land. Social work as a discipline that claims to be practice based should understand hybridisation better than any other field of study. When David saw Goliath, he was not intimidated by his corpulent presence, rather he saw the gargantuan figure as being too big to miss. In a similar vein, social work should look at other disciplines as providing opportunities for its continued growth as the world thrives on multidisciplinary efforts because of its polymorphous nature. Let the social work programme in Zimbabwe be pregnant enough to accommodate other disciplines through sharing of epistemic values. The stone age era did not end because people ran out of stones, NO. Rather, continued education, learning and training got people out of the stone age, disciplines should not be impervious to boundary spanning and continued learning, neither should they be full of themselves to extent of pooh-poohing other disciplines. Professional elitism has no space in liquid modernity.
