Culturally adequate social work

Entering the field of social work in Indigenous communities, I am seeking a new term that is not embedded in the idea of ‘crossing over’ from one culture to another. Rather, I am looking for a concept where the development of social work is rooted within local culture, knowledge and worldview. With the aim of making a fresh start, I am starting to use the term culturally adequate social work. At the present time, this concept is not fully developed. I started using the terminology before I had explored the full scope of the concept and its definition. The

concept an extremely useful reminder of the importance of grounding knowledge production in the plurality of epistemological approaches.

Development of culturally adequate social work for Indigenous people should involve knowledge, worldviews and traditions from the peoples concerned. It is important to stress that including several worldviews, does not mean to abandon western knowledge within social work. The intent is rather to acknowledge a broader focus including several worldviews in development of knowledge (Noreen Mokuau, 2011). I propose that one way of rooting social work in local culture is by using an Indigenous paradigm in social work research. This research project is based upon ontology, epistemology, axiology and methodology from an Indigenous paradigm. I will elaborate on this in the section ‘Philosophy of science’.

In developing the concept culturally adequate social work, I was inspired by the concepts of cultural competence, cultural humility and contextual social work. Culturally adequate social work includes taking power inequalities and power imbalances, as addressed in culturally humble social work, into consideration. Such work will require cultural adequacy on all three levels of knowledge, values, and skills, addressed within culturally competent social work. In addition, culturally adequate social work takes the context of social work practice into

consideration, addressed in contextual social work. The next step in developing culturally adequate social work takes these different approaches and places the development within the ontology and epistemology of the target cultural group. In this way of developing culturally adequate social work, the component knowledge, values, and skills are situated in local culture. Below, I seek to elaborate on how to secure the development of knowledge, values and methods within social work in Indigenous communities in local culture.

Let us start with the first one, knowledge. How can social work build on the knowledge of the community where the social service is placed? Knowledge is information and understanding

about the lifeforms and life experiences within the community (Saus, 2008a). Cultural heritage and description of the cultural group are two of these components. Others are knowledge on what it means to be in a minority situation, on effects of cultural trauma, colonization, identity, oppression, and diversity (Herring et al., 2013; Weaver, 1999).

Furthermore, social work needs to include knowledge of how variation, diversity, and multi-cultural societies affect families and individuals (Weaver, 2004). Culturally adequate social work embraces the insight of how discourses of Indigenous non-conformity play a role in the development of practice and policies (de Leeuw et al., 2010), thereby forming social work that challenges and overcomes these neutralized ideas.

The second component in culturally adequate social work is values. How can social work build upon the values of the community where the social service is placed? Saus (2006) divides the theoretical foundation of child welfare into: state of knowledge, view on human life, norms, and ethics. All of these are social constructions. Values and worldviews affect what is seen as good and bad, right and wrong. Searching for values within social work, one can analyze how these components find expression in the social work paradigm related to the community. Culturally adequate social work does not only recognize the values of the

community in which it operates, but incorporates the values into theoretical and practical social work.

Skills are the third component for a culturally adequate social work. How can skills and concrete methods in social work be in harmony with local culture? Traditions and cultural practices might be an arena for inspiration. Additionally, the methodological level provides a theoretical framework for the social workers to engage in dialogue and learn from the child and the family they are serving about their situation, their cultural heritage, and their current

family is practical knowledge on how to integrate the individual family’s values and needs into the social work practice system.

I do not in any way advocate cultural relativism. A way of acting is not good simply because it is a tradition. Taylor (1994) has a starting hypothesis stating that all human cultures have something valuable that is transferable to other human cultures. However, he upholds that the validity of this hypothesis needs to be investigated and evaluated. The value of ‘tradition’

must be measured within the standard of the culture, along with norms and ideas of good and bad (Taylor, 1994). Taking traditional values as a priori creates a danger of unquestioned theoretical assumptions (Bailin & Battersby, 2009). Prior to being implemented into social work practice, ideologies, values and traditions need to be questioned and validated as normatively good. However, multiple voices should be included into the debate of what is considered as good and right practice in social work.