Considering the environment in social work education: transformations for eco-social justice

Abstract

Addressing the global environmental crisis will require both personal and social transformation. Adult environmental education will clearly play an important role in such transformative processes, but needs to broaden its target audience beyond those already involved in, or committed to, environmentalism to include other potential allies in this process. Social work is a profession characterized by philosophical and practical concerns with social justice and human rights. This paper argues that social workers also have an important, yet largely unexplored, role to play in environmental practice. To realise this potential, social work education needs to provide opportunities for the linking of conceptual and practical environmental issues to social work's more traditional social justice concerns. This will involve the incorporate of forms of adult environmental education and ecological literacy into social work curricula. The author discusses how transformative learning approaches have been utilized in a subject on socio-environmentalism as part of a social work degree course.