Undergraduate Perceptions of Engaging In Social Justice

Background. The concept of social justice, while integral to the social work profession, is inconsistently and insufficiently defined in social work literature. When CSWE moved to competency-based assessment of social work education, the responsibility was placed on programs to ensure the value and knowledge of social justice required in past CSWE Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards (EPAS) advanced to include engagement and advocacy in practice (Vallade & Benner, 2025). Current EPAS (2022) requires assessment of demonstrated skills and cognitive and affective processes in addition to knowledge and values, ensuring that social workers promote and pursue social justice through practice (CSWE, 2022). This paper seeks to understand undergraduate student perceptions of the term to inform future social work pedagogy by asking students to define social justice. Method. Students in an introductory social work class designed to identify the breadth and depth of social work at a large Southeastern university in the fall semester of 2023 were asked to respond to a short-answer prompt to define social justice. A total of 217 undergraduate students in an introductory social work course responded to the open-ended question, “How would you define social justice?” The qualitative software NVivo was used to organize and code the data which was reviewed by the authors to subsequently identify themes and subthemes. Results. Students commonly perceived social justice as either an outcome, an abstract goal to be achieved; or as an action, behaviors that must be implemented. Students have an acute understanding of identities who most frequently experience injustice but require additional knowledge to actualize how social workers practice from a social justice paradigm. Responses showed that students understand the goals of social justice, but not the work inherent in reaching them. As well, responses show that students understand injustice very clearly, but less clear is whether students comprehend its resolution. Finally, many students recognized the complicity of systems as part of the problem, yet many also recognized systems as part of the solution which is particularly encouraging for social work education. Conclusion and Implications. Students see the eventual, associated outcome of equity, but there is a clear gap where they need to learn the steps necessary to achieve it. This could also reflect recent societal patterns of identification, agitation, and advocacy around social justice concerns, but limited examples of satisfactory resolution. Students may be responding to a sense that outcomes are primarily aspirational, particularly in a call out culture where people would be quick to identify insufficient justice if someone else claimed social justice was achieved. Much like cultural competence, social justice may be a difficult destination to ever fully claim. Social work education must advance the traditional value and knowledge based justice paradigm to address the skills needed to engage social justice in practice. Social work education must advance student conceptualization related to social justice as a competency, including skill development, to meet the accreditation standard of advancing social justice in practice.