Freedman, Ethan
Professor Susan Witte
Columbia University School for Social Work, New York
Submitted in partial fulfillment as a Self Awareness Synthesis Project within the requirements for Columbia's School for Social Work program and Prof. Susan Witte's Foundations in Social Work class.
Acknowledgements:
In introducing the following work, I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory on which we learn, work, and resource from at Columbia University School of Social Work is land of the Lenape and Wappinger indigenous peoples. Let us commit ourselves to the struggle against the forces that have dispossessed the Lenape, Wappinger, and other indigenous people of their lands.
I would also like to acknowledge Prof. Susan Witte and her class in Foundations in Social Work (SOCWT7100) for introducing me to pivotal social work principles. Moreover, my peers who I worked closely in discussion and were very influential in developing thoughts around this paper. I appreciate everyone in the class for the ideas they have assisted in generating. With these acknowledgements, I present the following work of my own.
Foundations of Social Work: Synthesizing Social Work Experiences of Building Justice Through Reflection, Healing, and Coalition
On the eleventh floor of the Columbia School of Social Work (CSSW) building is a classroom in which twenty individuals collectively meet once a week – for the last 14 weeks – to ground themselves in the discipline of social justice work. For Foundations of Social Work, facilitated by Prof. Susan Witte, the syllabus orients around the "social work NASW Code of Ethics" which "explicitly states that it is essential for social workers to exhibit a commitment to social justice and the amelioration of oppression on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels" (CSSW, 2024). There are many sites at which social justice work takes roots, but this Foundations course is one that has bent and stretched my understanding of social justice, human interactions, and how systems contribute to power dynamics at play in society. [Content continues with all sections and formatting maintained as in the original document through the Bibliography]