AASW 1987 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
On
"Conflict: The Challenge in Social
Work Practice"
Bonavista Room, Westin Hotel
Saturday 1987-03-21
The
arrangements and facilities for the Conference were very good, and the food was
excellent and plentiful.... our gratitude goes to Bob Chatwin and Lisa
Branconnier for Registration... Ruth Lewis and Wendy McConnell for Program...
Mark Nicoll for Public Relations.... Norm Bilodeau, a Past President of AASW,
for chairing the Planning Committee... and the Council of AASW , who also
arranged for the presence of the Minister of Social Services. Our gratitude
goes, too, to those colleagues who, because of cutbacks in their agencies, had
to take their holiday time to be present with us at our deliberations.
Impressions of the
Conference
The
theme of conflict, struggle, and disequilibrium was maintained throughout with
more emphasis, perhaps, on its application in intrapersonal, individual,
interpersonal, and small-group situations, than on policy, program, provisions,
and political issues.
The
program brochure carried the quotation by Krishnamurti, which was the key to
the content of the Conference sessions:
"It is only through
conflict, and the understanding of conflict, that there is integration."
This
is not a new concept to social workers and, indeed, it is but another way of
saying what we have believed about reciprocity, as a profession, and what we
have been teaching social work students. It is another way of saying:
"Truth can only be achieved in conflict with
its opposite."
"You need your enemies as much as you need your
friends."
"You value consensus only when you know
conflict."
Rather
than choosing between opposing views, social workers have always preferred to
draw a circle around it all; we have not drawn a line between opposing
factions, believing rather in the strength of linked opposites. Some have
called it closure... or balance... or a "pan view"... or "the
big picture". It is why most systems-perspective social workers have always
had trouble with role theory.... to them, a role is only a half-assed
relationship.
This
kind of linking occurred throughout the workshops so that, taken together, we
had a whole. One could not have...
of
Doctors McKeen and Wong, the emphasis on "inner space trips", and the
long journey to maturity
WITHOUT ...the spectre of budget cuts,
privatization, and a value base that says it may be OK to transmute the eternal
concept of the deserving and undeserving poor, to the "deserving
sick", and now, vis-à-vis the issue of adoption, those
"deserving" the status of "parents", based on socioeconomic
status...
families
WITHOUT …legal triangulations and issues for
social workers in their interventions in families, or the triangulations
described by Mrs. Osterman trying to relate to us, her Cabinet colleagues,
& consumers...
view
that our perception of reality IS the only reality; that finding meaning in
life is an existential pursuit, and the anti-scientism of hat approach,
WITHOUT …self-evaluation of practice, and the
harsh reality of employer/employee or union/professional relationships, or of
rural practice in
group
WITHOUT …its giving birth to its counter-part,
a social policy interest group....
And,
in keeping with the themes of the Conference and of the closing speakers,
McWhinney and Metcalfe, the message is that only myth is large enough to help
us make sense of our current reality, i.e., to provide a framework for
understanding it. This was part of their reasoning, I believe, in choosing Martin
Luther King's 1963 speech with which to end their presentation ("I have a
dream....").
These
things, at first glance, so opposing...so divergent... are, however, valid
parts of our field and, taken together, make the whole. No part of the total
picture, in and of itself, represents TRUTH in our profession. Our personal
preoccupations are inextricably linked to our political preoccupations... and
we, in this room, have chosen "the dangerous profession", for we have
chosen never to enjoy the luxury of focusing solely (to paraphrase Dr. Shanti
Khinduka, Dean of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work) "on the
plumage and to forget the (dying) bird".
So...
"thank-you", Norm Bilodeau and Margaret Dewhurst, for arranging to
help to remind us, on this annual occasion... and on others... of what it is to
be whole, for we shall need all of our mutually reinforcing parts in the lean
and mean days ahead.
Let
us take our leave, now, by listening to the words of a man wise enough to have
married a social worker.... a man who speaks to us of peace:
"...peace
without development is not peace...peace without racial equality and harmony is
not peace...peace without a reasonable quality of life is not peace. It is,
therefore, the fullness of
Douglas Roche, Canadian
Ambassador for
Disarmament, in notes for an
address to
public forums, as reported
in the Globe
and Mail, 1986-04-29