Redefining student voice: applying the lens of critical pragmatism

Enhancing critical social work practice: Using text-based vignettes in qualitative research

“…A critical quandary in this area is whether text vignettes can help build truly comprehensive practice knowledge regarding equitable practice, as they are, by design, suited to prompting responses to very specific, everyday scenarios, and thus not necessarily intended to build a comprehensive understanding of the material and discursive conditions of oppression (Wilks, 2004). Drawing on the tradition of critical pragmatism that has informed the current analysis (Feinberg, 2015; Jones and Hall, 2022), I argue that endorsing the use of text vignettes in empirical social work scholarship does not entail discounting alternate approaches to deepening knowledge of oppression, anti-oppression, and critical praxis. Similarly, in the context of social work education, text vignettes can be used alongside other pedagogical tools to gauge the values, knowledge, and skills of students in relation to critical, social justice-oriented practice, and to scaffold their development in this area (Asakura et al, 2020; Bain, 2023).…”

“…Although I was not able to incorporate aspects of constructivist grounded theory design involving recruitment, sampling, and data collection, my analytical process was informed by this methodological orientation in that I started with close readings of the raw data, and then gradually developed open and axial codes to conceptualize the role of text vignettes in generating insight about equitable social work practice with marginalized populations. I drew on critical pragmatism (Feinberg, 2015; Jones and Hall, 2022) to identify specific axial codes—particularly those reflected in the accounts of TGD participants—that appeared to disrupt normative ways the social workers in the sample tended to understand and respond to the marginalization of TGD service users, and selected these codes to conceptualize implications of the insights they each held for the use of text vignettes in qualitative social work research. Specifically, I identified connections between theory and practice held in the accounts of TGD service users, and abductively contrasted these insights against the data of social work participants to provisionally develop and then refine a conceptualization of how service user responses to the text vignette build on, challenge, and extend existing practice knowledge among social workers.…”

“…Recognizing potential problems in the utility of normative pragmatism for grappling with systems of oppression, critical pragmatism is an extension of pragmatist thought that is grounded in critical scholarship and therefore more fully anchored in a vision of social justice (Feinberg, 2015). This conceptual framework, though closely related to pragmatism in its concern with pluralism, instrumentalism, and the fallibility of knowledge, calls on researchers to consider differences in how knowledge is applied to affect people situated in variable social contexts, and in particular those located at intersections of oppression (Jones and Hall, 2022;McBride, 2021). Perhaps most importantly, critical pragmatists attend to the ways in which power can and often does shape the normative framing of social problems, and draw on this reflexive process to inform critical inquiry that generates applied knowledge for emancipatory or transformative change (Feinberg, 2015).…”