Infusing MSW programs with disability studies and disability justice: How to create explicit curriculum

Abstract

MSW students will work with a significant number of people with disabilities and thus need to learn about disability as both a descriptive and a political identity. While new curriculum resources and competencies developed by CSWE for teaching about disability are a critical step, little has been written about successful approaches to infusing disability content into social work curricula. We help address that need by describing our MSW curricula infusion process and lessons learned as a team of partnering faculty and disability justice activists. We describe the intersectional disability justice movement framework, arguing that this framework is needed to equip students to address urgent issues of social injustice.