Disrupting Assumptions and the Walls to Bridges Program

In her influential paper Innocence Lost, Suspicion Found Rossiter (2001) ponders whether to educate ‘for or against’ social work, teasing out the harms of ‘dividing practices’ that reinscribe class and race-based violations. I am interested in Rossiter’s assertation that ethical practice requires educators and practitioners to maintain a constant vigilance and skepticism about our professional knowledges and practices that often confirm inequality and misrecognition. As a social work educator for almost twenty-five years, I have been significantly influenced by Rossiter’s work. I discuss Rossiter’s theorizing about an ethics that precedes practice, a suspicion of conventional methods of both social work practice and social work pedagogy and listening for the unknown. This paper discusses how these concepts are reflected within the Walls to Bridges program (W2B), a university-based program that teaches classes in correctional facilities, comprised of both campus-based and incarcerated students.