Democratizing online social work education: addressing othering

This chapter examines co-creating the learning experience, engaging the expertise of stakeholders, purposely modelling inclusion, leveraging the class’s personal experiences as service users, and peer-supported learning. The examples provided show how engaging diverse peoples and facilitators’ experiences fosters inclusive teaching and learning moments. Key concepts of challenging colonizing practices and critical reflection are applied to our discussion of examples of challenging ‘othering’ in social work education. Through the examples we demonstrate how respectful, powerful, and transformational learning environments can be co-created with all educational stakeholders. Our experiences indicate that a democratic approach to teaching and learning facilitates reflective and transformational learning. In this chapter we propose embracing the perspectives of all stakeholders towards valid knowledge generation.