Social work education: current trends and future directions

Abstract

This chapter deals with changing patterns of social work education in a rapidly globalising world. Neoliberalism and advances in information technology are creating spaces for cross-border, virtual education as never before. The chapter interrogates the impact of neocolonial, capitalist expansion of higher education as a tradable commodity, and reviews some of the debates around the universal and the particular with regard to cross border virtual education. The universal-particular debate is further probed by reviewing global initiatives of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) and International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW), such as the Global Definition, program consultations linked to the Global Standards, and the proposal to form regional centres of excellence. While well-intentioned, neither the processes nor the outcomes of these initiatives are neutral, often reflecting geo-political power, the project of legitimation, hegemonic discourses and neoliberal and new managerialist thrusts towards standard setting, performance appraisals and external reviews within modernist notions of progress and development.