3.2 Epistemologies of the Helping Professions

Let’s use your future professions’ epistemology to explore this concept of knowledge justice. How, for example, are you expected to become knowledgeable in your field? Most of you will have a practical component to your program, whether a placement, co-op, applied project, or other hands-on experience. This tells us that lived experience, and learning under the guidance of other professionals, is an important and legitimate form of knowledge in the helping professions.

Another way to think about knowledge and epistemology is to ask: what counts as ‘evidence’ in your field? Because this resource is aimed at professional students, it’s likely that a governing body or professional association has defined the core knowledge, skills, and values that graduates of your program must demonstrate before entering the workforce. A shared expectation across many of your programs is the ability to engage in evidence-based practice. This means you are expected to integrate the best available evidence into your professional understanding so that you can make informed decisions when helping and caring for others.

What knowledge are you expected to use as “evidence” in addition to hands-on experience? In most helping professions, academic research is essential. You are likely required to take research methods courses and engage with academic sources in your assignments, to learn how to understand, evaluate, and apply research in your field. As the video in the next section explores, this makes sense given the care and methodology that go into the production of academic knowledge.

Building on what we saw in Chapter 2, applying a knowledge justice lens to evidence-based practice means recognizing that academic research often privileges Eurowestern ways of thinking (Leung 2022; Battiste 2018). This has consequences, as we’ve seen. It can lead to the exclusion or devaluation of other knowledge systems, including the lived experiences and cultural perspectives of the very communities your professions are meant to serve. Viewing evidence-based practice through the lens of knowledge justice means we must make room for multiple epistemologies within our professional work — not just those dominant in academic journals, but also the knowledges held by our clients, their families, and their communities.

The purpose of naming our epistemology is not to say that any one way of thinking is better than any other. Rather, we invite you to reflect on the edges of your discipline and to consider whose voices may be missing. As we begin practicing knowledge justice in this chapter, we start to learn how to identify, and make space, for those excluded voices.

The authors apply a knowledge justice lens to the levels of evidence pyramid

Elsey Gauthier, Elder-in-Residence to First Peoples House, University of Alberta, shares an introductory teaching about the Medicine Wheel. In the context of health, the Medicine Wheel encourages a holistic view of well-being by honoring balance—between mind, body, spirit, and emotions—and the interconnectedness of all things.