Biography of Teaching and Practice Experience
Jeffrey J Olson MSW, Ph.D
I've taught macro practice courses at both the MSW and BSW levels, and social welfare policy, Ethics, HBSE & Foundations of Social Work at the BSW level.
My work experience includes working at odd jobs in California and the east coast in the mid-1970s, as a school bus driver for a couple years, counselor/job developer in a Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA) program through 1981, as an estimator/project manager for an underground pipeline construction company through 1986, group home worker with juvenile sex offenders and rehabilitation counselor with incarcerated adolescents with serious and persistent mental illness in the early 90s, and community consultant while in graduate school. I've helped start a substance abuse prevention coalition in Laramie, Wyoming, and was a founding member of the Albany County Resource Center, a 501c3 non-profit corporation dedicated to promoting wellness in Laramie and the surrounding county.
Teaching
Philosophy
Paolo Freire developed what is called the “problem posing” method of education. Education for Freire involves dialogue amongst persons who clarify a problem in the their own language, and then in this language, develop solutions to problems. This is contrasted with what he calls the “banking concept” of education where the educator deposits knowledge in a student and then asks the student to give it back in an essay or test. I believe in an adult model of education which assumes that the learner wants to be actively involved in creation of his or her own educational experience.
My teaching philosophy has me help students develop the skills to think critically beyond a contrast and compare mode. Critical thinking for me is necessarily political. By this I mean that the larger institutional structures forming the classroom experience for me and the student are a major focus for critique. Rather than focusing on injustices “out there” in the world, always kept at a safe distance, I encourage critical examination of injustices “in here” within our common educational experience, within our lived worlds, and ourselves.
Social work is very much in danger of becoming (if it isn't already) a tool of larger social forces maintaining institutional oppression through classism, racism, sexism, and other isms. Social work education at OLC asks the student to critically examine what s/he is being taught in order to do so when s/he enters the world of work as a practicing social worker to be part of changing the social order.
Article: Social Work’s Professional and Social Justice Projects: Discourses in Conflict
Article: The Just World, Personal Belief and Social Work Education