Module 1 - Human Behaviour and the Social Environment

Question 1

What is a paradigm?

Answer 1

a worldview, general perspective, or way of breaking down the complexity of the real world; the beliefs, values, techniques, etc. Shared by members of a group/community; a perspective or explanation for how things are and how things can be

Question 2

What are traditional/dominant paradigms?

Answer 2

worldviews that have most influenced the environments that make up our worlds; ex. Those in which science is the single source of understanding

Question 3

What are alternative/possible paradigms?

Answer 3

worldviews that have had less influence/have been less prominent; often overlooked and undervalued, of significant importance to SWers and the people we serve; enrich, alter, or replace existing paradigms by including the voices, visions, values, beleifs, ways of doing/knowing, of people who have usually been left out of paradigm building

Question 4

What is paradigmatic analysis?

Answer 4

a process of continually asking questions about what the information we send and receive reflects about our own and others’ views of the world/people; evaluating perspectives for their consistency with the core values of social work; does this perspective contribute to preserving and restoring human dignity?

Question 5

What is a paradigm shift?

Answer 5

a profound change in the thoughts, perceptions, and values that form a particular vision of reality; often comes from seeing familiar and new things from a new/another’s perspective; such changes come when a (usually small) segment of the community has a growing sense that existing institutions are unable to adequately address the problems in the environment (an environment those same institutions helped create); involves conflict and struggle

Question 6

What is socialization?

Answer 6

the process of teaching new members the rules by which the larger group or society operates; involves imparting knowledge, values, and skills; We are socialized to interact with others and our environment from a paradigm (“paradigmatic perspective”); this socialization comes from formal education, family, religion, other groups/institutions, etc. Since formal ed and other institutions generally teach the traditional/dominant paradigm, it persists; those who use it are afforded more power and legitimacy

Question 7

What was the dominant worldview in the middle ages?

Answer 7

Scholasticism: the Christian God, represented by the Roman Catholic Church, was the sole determiner and judge of human behaviour; controller of the natural world and humans’ environments

Question 8

What movement began to question scholasticism in the early 1500s?

Answer 8

Protestantism

Question 9

Which new worldviews emerged during the enlightenment (17th & 18th centuries)?

Answer 9

• Science as a tool for humans to gain control over their behaviours and the universe
• The humanities, which sought answers by looking to/rediscovering idea and expressions from the past

Question 10

What is pre-modernism?

Answer 10

centrality of church/sacred basis of determining truth and knowledge, feudal economy, history as divinely ordered

Question 11

What is modernism?

Answer 11

centrality of secular humanism, individual reason, and science in determining truth; industrial age, capitalism, bureaucracy as basis of economic life; history as linear in the direction of constant progress driven by human rationalist and science

Question 12

What is postmodernism?

Answer 12

existing/traditional knowledge and knowledge creation processes intensely questioned; emphasis on multiple ways of knowing through processes that are non-hierarchical, feminist influenced, and participatory; economy more and more based on information, technology, and global capitalism; view of history as nonlinear, cyclical, continually rewritten

Question 13

What is digimodernism?

Answer 13

one example of post-postmodern theory; suggests the most critical event in current culture is the clash between a digitally driven world and the written word/text; reflected in “Web 2.0” (a more fluid and interactive internet than that of the past; ex. Users as first class entities with prominent profiles, the ability to form connections between users, the ability to post content in many forms, etc.)

Question 14

What is altermodernism?

Answer 14

a post-postmodern theory focused on how culture is shaped by the forces of economic globalization

Question 15

What is automodernity?

Answer 15

a post-postmodern theory which sees a new world formed by the encounter between digital automation and personal autonomy

Question 16

What is human science?

Answer 16

a combination of liberal arts and sciences; encompasses social, psychological, and biological sciences as they relate to humans; more inclusive, using multiple systems of inquiry

Question 17

What is culture?

Answer 17

shared values, traditions, norms, customs, arts, history, folklore, and institutions of a group of people; the human-made part of the environment

Question 18

What is a society?

Answer 18

a group of people who share a heritage or history

Question 19

What two processes contribute to the transmission of culture?

Answer 19

Socialization: teaching the culture by an elder generation to younger one explicitly through formal instruction and rules

Enculturation: (implicitly or subtly teaching culture to the younger generation in the course of everyday life

Question 20

What makes an idea normative?

Answer 20

it includes an opinion on how things “should” be; instead of creating good/healthy/normal vs. Bad/unhealthy/abnormal dichotomies, Swers seek to welcome the diversity of human behaviour and ways of seeing the world