Teaching about vulnerability and love in social work: lessons and reflections from two academics

Teaching vulnerably, and doing so in a way that ‘talks back’ to the dominant ‘banking model’ and the neoliberal forces that have entered the classroom where everything is evaluated through flawed metrics such as Student Evaluations of Teaching (SETs), is to take an enormous personal and professional risk. This paper is written as a critical collaborative autoethnographic reflective dialogue between two social work academics who embody diametrically opposed academic and life experiences. Contextualised within the space and place of the social work classroom, we offer stories and dialogue of our theoretical reflections of engaging with the concepts of love and vulnerability in our classrooms. Our narratives weave together an embodied vulnerability pedagogy, our processes of learning and our arrival at this place where we interrogate how vulnerability is taught, understood and experienced in social work education as part of our commitment to produce decolonised ways of teaching in social work.