Theoretical frameworks in social work education: a scoping review

Social work education now operates within a complex array of higher education imperatives while the practice context has changed to adapt to a culture with an emphasis on technical and instrumental approaches. In response, one Australian social work program has embarked on a curriculum redesign project to incorporate a consistent theoretical framework across the whole program. This paper presents the results of a scoping review, which aimed to inform the redesign by the identification of theoretical orientations of other social work programs. Anti-oppressive, critical and postmodern, critical race, First Nations and eco-social work frames dominated the literature. Positive psychological theories to support graduate resilience were present, as were a small number of systems frameworks. The analysis identified the relevance and importance of the 'implicit curriculum' concept that brings attention to the organizational cultures in which learning takes place. The multitude of conceptual papers compared to the dearth of implementation and evaluation papers may suggest institutional barriers to the implementation of whole curriculum theoretical frameworks. More implementation research is needed to better inform coherent theoretical orientations for social work education.