How changes in the Pacific/Asia region are shaping social work education and practice in Hawai'i.

Matsuoka, Jon K.

No problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness that created it.

Albert Einstein

At the February 2007 Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Board of Directors meeting, Dean Kay Hoffman, CSWE president, opened by making the statement, "Social work is out of step with the most critical social issues and problems confronting us in our society. We have lost ground to other professions and are moving down a path of irrelevance. Unless we change, social work may not exist in 30 years."

I reside in Hawai'i, a place far removed from the political nucleus of U.S. society, which also implies some distance from cutting-edge issues in social work. Yet, I found Dean Hoffman's words bold and profoundly resonating. In the Pacific/Asia arena social developments of capacious proportions are not within social work's rubric of primary concern, such as human trafficking, to name one. Rather than fully concentrating on these critically important issues, too many schools of social work continue to focus on producing clinicians, many of whom opt for private practice; or pressed by intense labor force demands and threats of declassification, too many schools of social work mass produce graduates to fill position slots in the public sector. In addition, social work education and practice face several systemic and structural requirements that make it very challenging for the social work profession to quickly accommodate the changing realities taking place around the world.

In recent years the institutions of political democracy have replaced institutions of political repression in our part of the world, and

classic forms of communism have come to an end. China, although far from being a model of democracy, has opened its economy to market forces. It is pushing hard to expand its middle class, which will have major implications related to purchasing power and consumptive patterns (East-West Center, 2002). It appears, however, that the democratization of China and other developing Asian countries is more a democracy of money. Communities are being disrupted by environmental pillaging to fuel China's insatiable need for resources. Displaced rural dwellers are flooding urban centers in search of employment. Migrant workers often suffer from workplace discrimination and scant family support. Approximately 250,000 Chinese commit suicide each year. Suicide is the leading cause of death among adults between 18 and 34 years of age (Beech, 2003). To address the social fallout from China's economic boom, some 200 social work education programs nationwide have formed since the 1990s.

The "overnight" Chinese phenomenon provides us with insights into the relationship between the U.S. brand of social work and economic development. Our role in the greater scheme is to tend to the needs of the free market's social fallout and the disparity that is the hallmark of a corporate-driven economy. In the field of social work, competence is generally defined by one's ability to heal and repair rather than by an acumen associated with prevention, making it difficult to ascertain our complicit role in sustaining exploitive systems.

In our society, the narratives emerging from a condition of economic wealth and hyper-consumerism include those that attribute social ills to permissive liberalism, emphasize free-market capitalism as the answer for delivering national prosperity, and support extravagant military appropriations as a way to combat terrorism. These themes in turn lead to cuts in federal social welfare programs, the deregulation of markets, and lucrative military contracts for corporate sponsors (Korten, 2006). At the same time, economic growth is held as a "cure" for poverty, unemployment, pollution, debt repayment, stress reduction and mental health, crime, divorce, and even drug addiction. These perspectives are often reproduced at the level of social work education and practice, which tends to valorize its own history of intercepting and reforming victims of capitalism.

As a profession, social work has much work to do to alter the narratives that drive the national agenda. We seem too narrowly focused on investing our energies in emulating "more credible" professions that have a strong scientific bent. The thrust in social work education toward evidence-based practice (EBP) is a case in point. EBP serves to validate social work practice by offering empirical data to demonstrate effectiveness. This movement serves to amplify a distinct cultural episteme that decontextualizes and reduces our important and complex work to disintegrate artifacts. For example, local and indigenous knowledge and practice are not acknowledged within the EBP movement and thus are negated. The assumptions driving this movement ignore the complexity of culture, the temporal and contextual aspects of recovery, and the symbiotic relationship between "scientific proof" and the affirmation of culturally biased practices.

The real advantage to living so far removed from the centrist forces of the United States' political and cultural nave is having the freedom to explore new reality streams that are aligned with our sense of place. Our approaches to thinking about social issues, research and ways of knowing, and practice are not bound by "universal" theoretical and methodological strictures that define human behavior. In Hawai'i, we are in the process of decolonizing our narratives through indigenizing our understanding of, and response to, social problems in the Pacific.

This process of discovery has led us to the realization that the notion of a multicultural mecca is much the discourse of those professing cultural and political hegemony who apply this image to justify their cultural and political penetration into new domains. In reality, multiculturalism and social equity rarely coexist. Multicultural societies are divided into the enfranchised and the disenfranchised along racial and ethnic lines, and moral justifications are used to explain the power differential. In the United States, and especially in Hawai'i, the discourse of racial tolerance overwhelms the reality of cultural tension and inequality and makes it unacceptable to be openly contentious. The social goal of coexistence is not the same as getting along, and the politics of respectful coexistence are not necessarily those of harmonic multiculturalism.

The University of Hawai'i's School of Social Work has the reputation of being a "multicultural" academy by virtue of its diverse cultural composition. Despite our national image, we are working collectively to transform this identify into themes that position us to better address the most significant local and regional issues, and those linked to global processes.

We are currently working to implement new initiatives that promote cultural coexistence in terms of economic and political equality. A focus on indigenization is a departure from our multicultural pretext in which a Western base pervades all other cultures. Indigenization means defining an identity and mission relative to the community to which the academy is accountable. In Hawai'i we are accountable to Pacific constituencies who subscribe to divergent life philosophies. The primacy of family and genealogy, propriety of traditional practices, wisdom of elders, intuitive intelligence, servant leadership, sense of place, environmental kinship and spirituality, collectivism, and restorative values over retribution are critical indigenous elements that support the sustainability of human well-being. We believe that these themes will guide us down a path to greater relevance--not only locally, but globally.

The process of indigenization in an academic setting means developing and infusing new teaching and learning methods, including coteaching of courses with faculty and indigenous practitioners; greater emphasis on "collective" learning styles and the use of metaphor; promotion of diverse and mixed research methods and indigenous ways of knowing, including participatory action methods; development of new practicum opportunities at community-based nongovernment organizations; and greater curricular emphasis on social policy and organic practices aimed at primary prevention.

In Hawai'i we are rallying to rescue ourselves from the oppression of exo-tourism and are moving toward sustainable, less derivative, and more dignity-making economies. Local living economies that offer fulfilling livelihoods and human-scale enterprises are being explored as an alternative to economies run by transnational corporations. If we succeed, perhaps Hawai'i could be a template for something new in the world. Hawai'i could be a place where people are free to pursue dreams other than that of rampant capitalism, a place where growing taro could be valued more than selling real estate, a place where there could be many accepted truths.

REFERENCES

Beech, H. (2003, November 10). Hidden away. Time (Asia ed.), 162, 31-39.

East-West Center. (2002). The future of population in Asia. Honolulu: East-West Center Research Program, Population and Health Studies.

Korten, D. C. (2006). The great turning: From empire to earth community. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Jon K. Matsuoka, PhD, is dean, School of Social Work, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Henke Hall, Room 224A, 1800 East-West Road, Honolulu, HI 96822; e-mail: [email protected].