SOCWK 120R: Introduction to Social Work

Sources and References

Primary textbook — Steven Hick, Social Work in Canada: An Introduction, 4th ed. (Thompson Educational Publishing). Supplementary texts — Raven Sinclair, Michael Anthony Hart, Gord Bruyere Wicihitowin: Aboriginal Social Work in Canada; Donna Baines (ed.) Doing Anti-Oppressive Practice: Social Justice Social Work; Bob Mullaly The New Structural Social Work; Margaret Kovach Indigenous Methodologies. Online resources — CASW (Canadian Association of Social Workers) Code of Ethics; Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report Calls to Action; Canadian Council for Social Development open reports.

Chapter 1 — What Is Social Work? Definitions, Roles, and Scope

Social work is a professional practice that sits at the meeting point of personal troubles and public issues. The International Federation of Social Workers defines it as a practice-based profession and academic discipline that promotes social change, development, cohesion, and the empowerment and liberation of people. In the Canadian context, Steven Hick describes social work as the profession concerned with helping individuals, families, groups, and communities enhance their well-being while working to change the conditions that produce suffering in the first place. This dual mandate — serving the person in front of you while pushing against structures that harm them — is what distinguishes social work from adjacent helping professions like psychology, counselling, or nursing.

In practice, social workers fill many roles. They act as counsellors in clinics, caseworkers in child welfare offices, advocates at social assistance tribunals, community organizers in tenant associations, policy analysts in government, hospital discharge planners, school support workers, and researchers. Hick groups these into direct practice (face-to-face work with clients), indirect practice (policy, administration, research), and community practice. The profession is regulated provincially in Canada, with colleges such as the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers setting registration requirements, scope of practice, and discipline processes. The Canadian Association of Social Workers (CASW) serves as the national voluntary association that speaks for the profession and maintains the Code of Ethics.

Social work is not social welfare, though the two are tightly connected. Social welfare refers to the broader system of income security, services, and programs a society provides to meet human needs; social work is one of the professional practices that operates within that system. Understanding this distinction matters because it highlights that social workers are both employees of the welfare state and, at times, its critics. They help people navigate programs that may simultaneously support and constrain them — a tension the profession has never fully resolved and that runs through every subsequent chapter of this course.

Chapter 2 — The Canadian Social Welfare System

The Canadian welfare state took shape piecemeal across the twentieth century and remains a patchwork of federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal responsibilities. The 1867 Constitution Act assigned most social services to the provinces, which means health, education, child welfare, and social assistance vary significantly across jurisdictions. Federal responsibilities include Employment Insurance, Old Age Security, the Guaranteed Income Supplement, the Canada Pension Plan, the Canada Child Benefit, and Indigenous services. Provinces operate social assistance programs (often called “welfare” colloquially), disability supports, child protection, and most direct services.

The system is usually described as residual, institutional, or developmental. A residual system intervenes only after family and market have failed; an institutional system treats social supports as a normal part of modern life; a developmental system invests in people as contributors to collective well-being. Canada blends elements of all three but leans residual, especially in income security, where benefits are typically means-tested and set below low-income thresholds. Hick and others note that Canada’s social spending is moderate by OECD standards — more generous than the United States, less generous than Scandinavia.

Key programs students should recognize include Medicare (publicly funded physician and hospital services under the Canada Health Act), Employment Insurance, social assistance under various provincial names, the Canada Child Benefit introduced in 2016, housing programs delivered jointly by federal and provincial governments, child welfare (provincial), and long-term care (provincial, largely privatized). Canadian Council for Social Development reports regularly document gaps: deep poverty among single parents, Indigenous peoples, racialized Canadians, people with disabilities, and recent immigrants. The welfare state’s gaps are where social workers most often find their clients, and where the profession’s advocacy role becomes most visible. The system is not static: retrenchment in the 1990s, the 2017 National Housing Strategy, expansions during COVID-19, and ongoing debates about basic income, pharmacare, and dental care all reshape what social workers can offer.

Chapter 3 — Eurocentric Histories of Social Work

The professional history of social work in Canada is usually told as a story beginning in the late nineteenth century, when urbanization, industrialization, and immigration strained informal kin and religious supports. Early responses drew on British and American models. The Charity Organization Societies (COS), founded in London in 1869 and transplanted to Canadian cities, tried to coordinate private charity, distinguish the “deserving” from “undeserving” poor, and apply moral uplift through “friendly visiting.” Mary Richmond’s Social Diagnosis (1917) turned COS visiting into systematic casework and is often cited as the beginning of professional method. At roughly the same time, the settlement house movement — Toynbee Hall in London, Hull House in Chicago under Jane Addams, University Settlement in Toronto — took a different approach, with middle-class workers living alongside poor and immigrant communities and pushing for structural reform.

These two strands, casework and settlement, continue to shape the profession. Casework developed into clinical practice, counselling, and individual assessment. The settlement tradition fed into community organizing, social policy advocacy, and group work. Canadian figures such as J. S. Woodsworth, a Methodist minister who worked at All Peoples’ Mission in Winnipeg and later helped found the CCF, embody the reform-oriented branch. Bessie Touzel, Charlotte Whitton, and Harry Cassidy built the infrastructure of Canadian social administration in the mid-twentieth century.

University-based social work education began at the University of Toronto in 1914 and spread across Canada by the 1960s. Professionalization brought benefits — training standards, research, ethical accountability — but also drew critique. Scholars in the anti-oppressive tradition argue that professionalization distanced social work from the communities it served, entrenched middle-class values, and absorbed radical impulses into state employment. It is crucial to recognize that this Eurocentric history is only one account. It largely ignored Indigenous helping traditions that long predated and continue alongside settler institutions, and it treated the imposition of residential schools, child removal, and welfare bureaucracies on Indigenous peoples as peripheral rather than central to the profession’s story.

Chapter 4 — Indigenous Worldviews and Helping Traditions

Indigenous peoples across what is now Canada — First Nations, Inuit, and Metis — have practiced helping, healing, and community care for thousands of years, grounded in distinct worldviews that predate and exceed Western social work. Raven Sinclair, Michael Anthony Hart, and Gord Bruyere, in Wicihitowin, argue that Aboriginal social work is not a cultural variant of mainstream practice but a discipline in its own right, rooted in Indigenous philosophies, languages, ceremonies, and relational ethics. The Cree word wicihitowin — roughly, “the process of helping each other” — names a way of being together rather than a professional technique.

Common elements across many Indigenous worldviews include relational ontology (the self is constituted through relationships with family, community, ancestors, land, and non-human beings), holism (mind, body, emotions, and spirit are addressed together), cyclicality (healing moves through seasons and life stages rather than linear goals), and the centrality of land and place. The Medicine Wheel, used in many Anishinaabe and Cree teaching traditions, offers one widely shared pedagogical frame, though it is not universal and should not be treated as generic “Indigenous content.” Margaret Kovach, in Indigenous Methodologies, emphasizes that Indigenous knowledge systems are tied to specific nations, territories, and protocols and cannot be abstracted into universal principles without distortion.

Hart’s concept of Indigenous wellness or mino-pimatisiwik (Cree: “the good life”) names a practice goal oriented toward balanced relationships rather than symptom reduction. Helping roles in many nations include Elders, ceremonial practitioners, knowledge keepers, clan mothers, and kin caregivers — roles that are not equivalent to professional social work and in some cases actively resist professionalization. Contemporary Indigenous social work often works at the interface, combining registered social work credentials with accountability to community protocols and ceremony. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action 18–24 specifically name health, education, and social work as sites where the profession must make space for Indigenous approaches rather than merely adding them as cultural decoration.

Chapter 5 — Settler Colonialism and Canadian Social Welfare

Settler colonialism is not an event in the past but an ongoing structure that organizes land, governance, and relationships in Canada. The profession of social work in Canada cannot be understood apart from it. The Indian Act of 1876, the residential school system (operating from the 1830s until 1996), the Sixties Scoop (the mass apprehension of Indigenous children into non-Indigenous homes from roughly the 1960s into the 1980s), and the continuing overrepresentation of Indigenous children in child welfare and Indigenous adults in prisons all rely on — and have often been administered by — social workers.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 Final Report documented the residential school system as cultural genocide and issued 94 Calls to Action. Several speak directly to child welfare, calling for reductions in the number of Indigenous children in care, funding parity with non-Indigenous services, Indigenous control of child welfare, and the education of social work students on the history and present of colonialism. The 2019 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls extended these findings, documenting how colonial violence continues through state institutions including child protection and policing.

Structural critiques from Bob Mullaly and others argue that the welfare state is not a neutral ameliorator of inequality but itself a key site where colonial and capitalist relations are reproduced. Social workers administer assistance rates set deliberately below poverty lines, remove children from families whose “neglect” is inseparable from poverty, and authorize involuntary psychiatric interventions. These are not errors in an otherwise just system; they are structural features. Taking settler colonialism seriously means that decolonization is not a metaphor for inclusivity, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have argued, but a concrete set of obligations about land, jurisdiction, and relationship. For social work it implies supporting Indigenous-led services, transferring resources and authority, learning treaty relationships, and accepting limits on settler social work’s role in Indigenous communities.

Chapter 6 — Values and Ethics: The CASW Code

The Canadian Association of Social Workers publishes a Code of Ethics and accompanying Guidelines for Ethical Practice that articulate the values and expected conduct of the profession. The current Code identifies six core values: respect for the inherent dignity and worth of persons, pursuit of social justice, service to humanity, integrity in professional practice, confidentiality in professional practice, and competence in professional practice. Each value is accompanied by principles that translate it into obligations — for example, the value of social justice commits social workers to advocate for fair distribution of resources and to challenge discrimination.

Ethical practice is not a matter of memorizing rules. Most working social workers face situations where values conflict: the duty to respect a client’s self-determination rubs against the duty to protect a child from harm; confidentiality meets a legal duty to report; the obligation to the employing agency meets the obligation to the client. The Code does not automatically resolve these dilemmas. It asks the social worker to weigh values, consult with supervisors and colleagues, document reasoning, and act in a way that can be defended to peers and to the people most affected.

Mandatory ethical duties include reporting suspected child abuse or neglect under provincial child welfare law, avoiding exploitative dual relationships, maintaining appropriate records, and not engaging in sexual contact with clients. The Code is enforceable through provincial regulatory colleges, which can suspend or revoke registration. Anti-oppressive writers like Donna Baines push further, arguing that traditional codes treat ethics as individual behaviour and underplay the ethics of complicity: what does it mean to ethically administer an unjust policy? Mullaly and others argue that structural injustice places additional ethical obligations on practitioners to work for change, not merely to deliver services politely. Students should read the CASW Code as a floor rather than a ceiling, and as a living document in conversation with the communities social workers serve.

Chapter 7 — Anti-Oppressive Practice

Anti-oppressive practice (AOP) is one of the dominant theoretical orientations in contemporary Canadian social work education. Drawing on feminist, anti-racist, Marxist, queer, disability, and Indigenous scholarship, AOP argues that human suffering is organized by intersecting structures of power — capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity — and that helping people without addressing these structures is at best incomplete and at worst complicit. Donna Baines’s edited collection Doing Anti-Oppressive Practice is a key Canadian text, and Bob Mullaly’s New Structural Social Work provides a sustained theoretical foundation.

AOP practitioners begin from a structural analysis: what appears as an individual problem (unemployment, addiction, family conflict, mental distress) is examined for its connections to larger social conditions. This does not mean dismissing individual experience or refusing to help with immediate concerns. It means holding individual and structural levels together, so that a social worker helping a single mother access food bank services also understands and addresses how child benefit rates, housing costs, and gendered wage gaps produce her situation.

Core AOP practices include critical self-reflection on the worker’s own location in systems of privilege and oppression; centring the knowledge of people most affected; challenging agency practices that replicate harm; building solidarity with social movements; and organizing collectively with colleagues against retrenchment and workplace injustice. AOP is sometimes criticized for being long on critique and short on technique, and for asking workers to solve with individual reflection problems that require collective action. Responses from Baines and others point to union organizing, policy coalitions, and practitioner-led inquiry as concrete vehicles. A key methodological commitment is epistemic humility: AOP insists that theory be accountable to service users rather than imposed on them, and that practice wisdom from marginalized communities be treated as knowledge, not anecdote.

Chapter 8 — Ecological and Systems Perspectives

Alongside AOP, the ecological or person-in-environment perspective is a long-standing organizing framework for Canadian social work. Drawn from general systems theory and the ecological models associated with Carel Germain and Alex Gitterman, it treats individuals as nested within families, peer networks, organizations, neighbourhoods, communities, and broader social, economic, and ecological systems. The goal of practice is to improve the fit between people and their environments, whether by helping the person, changing the environment, or altering the transactions between them.

An ecological assessment maps the relevant systems and their interactions: a young person’s school performance, for example, is placed in the context of family dynamics, peer relationships, school climate, housing stability, neighbourhood resources, and broader policy. Tools like the ecomap and the genogram make these relationships visible and often reveal strengths and supports that a narrower assessment would miss. The perspective is compatible with many interventions and does not prescribe a particular technique; it is best understood as a way of seeing.

Critics rightly note that a purely ecological framing can flatten power differences — as if all systems were equally weighted and the worker’s task were simply to improve equilibrium. Structural and anti-oppressive writers integrate ecological thinking with analyses of oppression, insisting that “environment” includes racism, colonialism, class exploitation, and gendered violence, not only the local school and family. Indigenous scholars push further still, arguing that “environment” in most social work texts is stripped of land, ancestors, and more-than-human relations. A decolonial ecological perspective would treat the land itself as a relation, not a backdrop, and would ask how practice contributes to or undermines Indigenous relationships to territory. Students should treat systems and ecological thinking as foundational but insufficient on its own, best combined with structural and Indigenous analyses.

Chapter 9 — Practice with Individuals

Direct practice with individuals — sometimes called casework, counselling, or clinical social work — is where many students first imagine the profession. It typically involves engaging a client, assessing their situation, agreeing on goals, intervening, and evaluating outcomes, often within a time-limited frame set by the agency. Canadian social workers draw on a wide range of intervention models: strengths-based practice (Dennis Saleebey), solution-focused brief therapy, narrative therapy (Michael White and David Epston), cognitive-behavioural approaches, motivational interviewing, crisis intervention, trauma-informed care, and increasingly practices drawn from Indigenous healing traditions where appropriate and authorized.

Effective individual practice rests less on technique than on relationship. Decades of research into the “common factors” of therapy suggest that the working alliance — mutual respect, agreement on goals, and a collaborative bond — accounts for more outcome variance than the specific school of practice. Canadian texts emphasize cultural humility, attention to power differences between worker and client, and awareness that the social worker usually represents an institution with significant authority (for example, to open a file, share information, or report).

Assessment should be multidimensional: presenting concern, history, strengths, supports, risks, structural conditions, and goals. Good practice avoids the twin errors of reducing clients to diagnoses and of treating their problems as purely individual. A housing-insecure client benefits from emotional support, but they also benefit from help navigating housing systems; a client in grief benefits from listening, but they may also need financial support while unable to work. Evaluation is not an afterthought: single-case designs, goal attainment scaling, and client feedback measures help practitioners learn whether their work actually helps, and build the evidence base that service users and funders rightly demand.

Chapter 10 — Practice with Families

Family practice in Canadian social work addresses the family system — however the family defines itself — as the unit of concern. Definitions of family are deliberately broad: biological, chosen, extended, blended, kinship networks, and household units may all count. Work with families ranges from intensive therapy drawing on structural family therapy (Minuchin), Bowen family systems, or narrative approaches, to family support, mediation, kinship care coordination, and preventive home visiting programs.

A key distinction in Canada is between voluntary family work (where a family seeks help) and involuntary work (where involvement is mandated, usually by child welfare authorities). Involuntary contexts place the worker in an authority position and require transparency about mandate, limits of confidentiality, and decision-making power. Skilled practitioners work to build relationships within that reality rather than pretending it does not exist.

Family assessment tools include genograms, which map intergenerational patterns, and ecomaps, which place the family in its environment. A genogram drawn with a family often surfaces resilience, hidden supports, and intergenerational trauma in ways that a questionnaire cannot. Cultural humility is essential: family norms around privacy, elder authority, gender roles, child rearing, and help-seeking vary widely, and social workers must not assume the middle-class nuclear family as a default. Indigenous scholars highlight how “family” in many nations extends well beyond household and includes clan, extended kin, and ceremonial relationships, and how colonial child welfare has repeatedly misread these relationships as dysfunction. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action and the federal An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Metis children, youth and families (2019) reframe family practice by affirming Indigenous jurisdiction over child and family services.

Chapter 11 — Practice with Groups and Communities

Group work has been part of social work since the settlement movement and takes several forms: support groups, psychoeducational groups, therapy groups, task groups, mutual aid groups, and social action groups. Canadian social worker and theorist William Schwartz articulated the mutual aid model, in which the worker’s role is to help members use each other as helpers — a shift from expert-led instruction to collective process. Effective group facilitation attends to forming, norming, storming, and performing dynamics; manages conflict and silence; and uses the group itself as the primary instrument of change.

Community practice — sometimes called community organizing, community development, or macro practice — takes the community as the client. Jack Rothman’s classic typology distinguishes three modes: locality development (emphasizing consensus and capacity building in a geographically defined community), social planning (rational analysis and coordination of services), and social action (conflict-based mobilization of disadvantaged groups to shift power). Canadian community practice has drawn on all three, with strong traditions in the Antigonish cooperative movement, urban tenant organizing, anti-poverty groups, and Indigenous community-led development.

Community practitioners conduct community assessments, facilitate coalitions, support resident leadership, navigate funding and political environments, and help communities articulate demands. The work requires analytic skills (understanding budgets, policy, and power maps), relational skills (trust, patience, conflict tolerance), and political skills (strategy, timing, negotiation). It also requires honesty about whose community one is working in. A settler social worker supporting a First Nation’s housing campaign, for instance, may take a supportive and accountable role rather than a leading one. Community practice is where social work’s commitment to social change becomes most concrete, and where the profession is most obviously in conversation with social movements rather than acting on behalf of isolated clients.

Chapter 12 — Fields of Practice: Child Welfare, Mental Health, Aging, Disability

Canadian social workers are employed across many fields, each with its own law, funding logic, and practice traditions. Child welfare is the most visible: provincial children’s aid societies investigate reports of abuse and neglect, provide supports, and when necessary apprehend children into foster or kinship care. The field is in crisis — Indigenous and Black children are wildly overrepresented, poverty is routinely confused with neglect, and frontline workers face heavy caseloads and vicarious trauma. Bill C-92 and Indigenous child welfare agencies are slowly reshaping the system.

Mental health social work spans hospital psychiatry, community mental health, crisis teams, and increasingly primary care. Workers conduct assessments, provide counselling, coordinate care, and advocate for clients within a system that still struggles with coercive practices, racial disparities in diagnosis, and chronic underfunding. Trauma-informed, recovery-oriented, and harm-reduction approaches have gained ground, often in response to advocacy by service users themselves.

Addictions and harm reduction practice has moved from abstinence-only models toward harm reduction, including supervised consumption, naloxone distribution, and housing-first programs — a shift strongly shaped by people who use drugs organizing for their own survival during the toxic drug crisis. Aging and disability practice includes long-term care, home care, carer support, and navigation of disability income programs, all fields marked by tensions between institutional convenience and person-directed care. Other major fields include immigration and refugee settlement, corrections and forensic practice, school social work, health-care social work in hospitals and hospice, and workplace employee assistance programs. Each field has specialist knowledge, but all share the core commitments of the profession: relationship, assessment, ethical practice, and attention to structural conditions.

Chapter 13 — Social Work and Social Justice

Social justice is named in every major definition of social work, but its meaning is contested. Liberal interpretations emphasize fair procedures, equal opportunity, and non-discrimination. Structural interpretations, associated with Mullaly and others, hold that justice requires redistribution of resources and power, and that unequal outcomes for groups are evidence of structural injustice regardless of procedural fairness. Indigenous interpretations centre treaty relationships, land, and self-determination. Feminist, anti-racist, and queer interpretations centre recognition of differences that liberal equality has historically erased.

These are not purely academic debates. They shape what social workers do on Monday morning. A procedural view might lead a worker to ensure each client is treated politely and offered the same services. A structural view might lead the same worker to ask why so many clients are in the same trouble and to organize with colleagues and service users to change the conditions producing it. A decolonial view might lead the worker to ask whose land the office is on, what relationships it has with local Indigenous communities, and whether its services help or harm those communities.

The profession’s relationship to social justice has been uneven. Canadian social workers have participated in labour organizing, anti-poverty campaigns, disability rights movements, refugee sanctuary, tenant organizing, and Indigenous solidarity. They have also administered residential schools, carried out the Sixties Scoop, enforced coercive psychiatric practices, and policed the poor. Both histories are real, and the present is no different: individual social workers can choose whether to be instruments of control, polite administrators of managed suffering, or workers in solidarity with those they serve. That choice is easier in solidarity with others — in unions, professional associations, coalitions, and movements — than alone.

Chapter 14 — The Future of Social Work in Canada

Canadian social work enters the coming decade under pressure from several directions at once. Neoliberal managerialism continues to squeeze agencies with metrics, short-term contracts, and risk-averse practice protocols, while frontline workers face burnout, moral injury, and unprecedented complexity in the people they serve. The opioid toxicity crisis, housing unaffordability, climate displacement, rising hate violence, and the long tail of the COVID-19 pandemic all intensify demand without bringing matching resources.

At the same time, the profession is being reshaped by calls for accountability to the communities it serves. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the MMIWG National Inquiry have made it untenable to teach or practice social work without sustained engagement with settler colonialism. Black, Indigenous, and racialized scholars, service users’ movements, disability justice advocates, and trans and queer communities are insisting that their knowledge move from margins to centre. Laura-Lynn MacDonald and others in Reimagining Social Work in Canada argue that this is an opportunity to recover the profession’s social justice roots rather than a threat to its legitimacy.

Several practical directions are emerging. Indigenous-led child welfare agencies are slowly assuming jurisdiction under Bill C-92. Harm reduction is moving into mainstream services. Trauma-informed and culturally safe practice are becoming standard expectations rather than specialty additions. Social work education is incorporating decolonization and anti-oppressive practice as required content. New basic income pilots, pharmacare, dental care, and housing strategies reopen debates about the shape of the welfare state. Technologies — electronic records, telehealth, AI-assisted assessment — raise ethical questions the Code is only beginning to address.

What remains constant is the core of the work: showing up for people in difficulty, with competence, humility, and a willingness to challenge the conditions that produced the difficulty. Students entering the profession should expect to learn continuously, to work in teams, to be accountable to those they serve, and to join with colleagues in defending both clients and the profession’s better traditions. Social work in Canada will be what its practitioners, educators, service users, and allied movements together make it.