Attending to Social Justice in Clinical Social Work: Supervision as a Pedagogical Space

Although social justice is a central professional value of social work articulated in ethics codes, clinical social workers have been long criticized for not clearly incorporating this professed commitment into practice. Supervision is an optimal space within which clinicians can develop knowledge and skills to attend to the issues related to social justice in their practice. A growing body of literature emphasizes social justice in the delivery of clinical services, yet there is a death of literature on how clinical supervision can promote social justice seeking clinical work. In this paper, we draw from existing literature to identify key elements involved in social justice seeking clinical supervision. Using Goodyear's (Clin Superv 33:82-99, 2014) learning mechanisms of clinical supervision, which consists of modeling, feedback, direct instruction, and self-directed learning, we discuss a case composite to illustrate ways in which clinical supervision can serve as a pedagogical space to advance clinical social workers' commitment to social justice.